Clipper discussion (sub anonymously by an IPer

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Dave:


IT WOULD BE BEST TO POST THE FOLLOWING ANONYMOUSLY -- IF YOU POST IT.


======================


In a summary of last Friday's briefings on KEE policy decisions, Steve
Walker made the following observation:


        "- details on key escrow agents (NIST and Treasury (it seemed
        important to someone to point out that neither of these were
        "law enforcement" related agencies)) and key escrow procedures
        were announced."


I believe that his summary may have been circulated by you and it was
certainly elsewhere on the net; I suppose that his parenthetical
comment is attributed to some government person.


Some clarification is warranted.


It's hard to believe that the government would have made such a
statement about "law-enforcement related".  According to my
Congressional directory, BATF, the Secret Service, and the U.S.
Customs Service are all components of the Department of Treasury.
Each of them certainly has enforcement authority, carries weapons, and
generally behaves like any other government entity that is commonly
considered to be law enforcement.  Each of them is charged with
enforcing a certain set of laws, many of which involve criminal or
anti-social actions.  The most that can be said is that these three are
not components of the Department of Justice.


One can cop out and assert that "law enforcement related" was intended
to mean enforcement of the laws with which the FBI and state/local
police departments of various kinds are concerned -- the things which
involve the Department of Justice and the attention of the criminal
court system.


But in the strict construction of the phrase, it seems to me that the
Department of Treasury must be considered suspect as an objective
disinterested escrow agent.  Any one of the 3 components noted above
could easily be interested in wire tap activity -- which would seem to
be the proper way to measure appropriateness of an escrow agent.  In
fact, Customs is involved as a part of the drug-control community, and
the drug situation has been used as one of the arguments for recent
encryption policy decisions.


NIST is clean and without enforcement authority, and there is no
component of Commerce that would appear to have enforcement
responsibility that would reasonably expect to require wire tap
support.


The above are not matters of opinion; they simply reflect what the
facts are.