The government insisted that Clipper would be merely a voluntary standard, but government documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act now confirm the suspicions of civil liberties advocates that the government really believes key escrowed encryption will only meet law enforcement standards if it is mandatory. The proposal provides no privacy safeguards to prevent the compromise of the key escrow agent or the key. The meetings were called to solicit input from industry on the Clipper II proposal. The ACLU led one working group to vote 7-7 in favor of condemning the entire proposal. On September 15th, NIST discussed the implementation of a federal key escrow encryption standard.
Encryption is speech protected by the First Amendment.
The Administration's current key escrow proposal, like the Clipper proposal, continues to tread on the First Amendment rights of American individuals and businesses to use encryption technologies to secure their private communications. The current proposal, like Clipper, should be rejected on First Amendment grounds alone. The current proposal will not accomplish its stated objectives because a wide array of encryption is available around the globe and will continue to be employed in place of American government-approved key escrow software. The only key escrow proposal that could begin to satisfy the government's objectives would be an outright ban on the sale of encryption technologies other than those approved by the government and key escrowed. The ACLU fears that the current proposal, and similar proposals, are merely the first step towards mandatory key escrow of encryption.