The basic idea was that encryption has always been considered a military weapon. This goes back at least a few thousand years, one of the first ciphers taught to beginning students is the Caesar cipher, named after one of the Roman Caesars.

I don't know when it started, but Tim May picked up hints about it and started one of the longest and highest volume threads in UseNet history, called "A Trial Balloon to Ban Cryptography?" before May of 1993 ( http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1993/05/msg00348.html)

After the cypherpunks debated the idea for months, the Clinton Adminstrtation announced the "Clipper" effort, which defined a strong encryption hardware standard with the minor requirement that the US Government be able to keep copies of the keys so that they could read the data from selected bad guys.

The standard definition of bad guys was "drug dealers, pediophiles and terrorists." While this is clearly a list of bad guys, it doesn't include others that I can think of such as:

• crooked politicians
• book cooking businessmen (Enron, WorldCom, etc.)
• brutal police
• real and pseudo fascists

In due time, the Government realised that it had to hold public meetings before it could promulgate regulations, pass laws, etc. So a series of meetings were held at NIS&T on what they called by the nice Orwellian phrase: "Encryption Key Recovery" (see http://csrc.nist.gov/keyrecovery/) The meetings were held on Sept. 6-7, 1995.

I attended the meetings and wrote up some notes. These are stored in many archives on the Internet, just ask your favorite search engine for them, but since I wrote them, I think I should at least keep a copy on my website.

• I did not write this note, Comments about encryption by Dr. Peter J Denning, who taught several of the classes that I took while in graduate school.
• September 95 summary postings to cypherpunks
• My December "export" summary posting to cypherpunks
• A longer December Export version part 1.

There were additional documents on my grad school website, these are linked to in many locations, but I do not have copies of the files.

Related pages and links

• It Came From Planet Clipper: The Battle Over Cryptographic Key "Escrow"
• Google for "Proposed Statutory Trusted Third Party Rules for Encryption"
• EFF archive on Key Escrow
• EFF on Clipper
• EPIC's archive on Clipper

Follow this link to my cryptography pointer page.