by Shari Steele and Daniel J. Weitzner

About the authors: Shari Steele is a Maryland attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Daniel J. Weitzner is deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology. Both organizations seek to protect the civil liberties of users of telecommunications media.

On April 16, 1993, the Clinton Administration announced a national standard for encryption. Under the Administration’s Clipper Chip proposal, voice telephone conversations would be encrypted by chips built into the telephone units used by the caller and the call recipient. Put simply, when a call is made, the two telephones involved communicate with one another and establish a unique key based on information contained on each of their chips. The telephones then use that key to encrypt and decrypt the conversation. In this way, anyone attempting to wiretap...