From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Thu, 9 Nov 1995 17:37:44 +0800
To: John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>
Subject: Re: "Industry Group Rebuffs U.S. on Encryption" (NYT 8Nov95, C3)
Message-ID: <199511090914.BAA08379@ix.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 04:50 PM 11/8/95 -0800, you wrote:
>A group of 37 companies and trade and privacy associations sent a
>letter to Al Gore yesterday, complaining about Clipper-II and crypto
>export controls, and promising to send their own policy proposals
>to Congress and the Administration within six months.

We talked about this at dinner - what kind of proposals can industry offer, 
other than "128 bits and honest escrow" or "64 bits and no escrow"?
"128 bits now, with no escrow if you want any campaign contributions this fall"
or simply "get stuffed, we're all buying our crypto from Europe and including
it in all our products" ?

According to one of the newspaper articles, the gang of 37 is a Jerry Berman/CDT
coordination, so I don't expect one of the more radical answers from them,
but maybe they'll do the right thing.  The fact that Netscape is including
secure email in their Navigator next release can be a big lever pushing the
Feds toward giving up, and perhaps deserves some publicity once the 
release version is out the door.
#--
#				Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# Phone +1-510-247-0663 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281