"foreign press is *torching* U.S. snoop-n-peep project"

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

from a friend


  [Just received this from an associate in Switzerland who is well-known to
many in the computer racket.  --jim]


...
I've been meaning to ask you just
how much play the Clipper issue has gotten in the U.S. popular press.
I'm really surprised at how much coverage you see here, in press that's
the equivalent of Time/Newsweek/big city newspapers, and universally
negative.  Basically, as seen in the Swiss and French press, the US is
using its big stick muscle to ram a technology down the throats of
people worldwide so that NSA can snoop on them.  This is particularly
an issue in the case of GSM (global cellular phones), where the US has
pretty much won the battle to make Europe weaken its original super-tough
voice encryption, threatening to deny access to the internal U.S.
market if they do (and then they pull a switcheroo, after GSM is
weakened, by not adopting it but going for Clipper instead).


The sense I got in the U.S. was that Clipper was still pretty much only
an issue in the technologically knowledeable subcommunity, so I'd
be interested to hear if it's now getting broader visibility.
  [unauthorized copy, thus anonymous, here]