FIPS - Federal Information Processing Standard. A generic term for US govt. The ITAR restrictions are preventing US software and hardware manufacturers from effectively competing in the burgeoning international market for encryption products. Key Escrow - keeping a copy of a user's encryption keys. In actually secure cryptography, no one but the individual users have copies of their secret keys for decryption.
Legal authorization is as yet undefined.
Key escrow, by it's very nature is antithet- ical to the concept of cryptography, since it compromises security by definition. This does not prevent the government from referring to it as a privacy enhancement, of course. A modified govt. It would be wholly inappropriate, though, to hold in escrow the attorney's personal-use crypto keys. Almost every word of the non-government testimony was opposed to Clipper.