Technically, Clipper was just as scary as it was politically and in law-enforcement terms. Scientists and mathematicians loved to dissect encryption schemes in academic papers, and keep checking and rechecking them over the years for flaws. But Clipper’s designers withheld the information that outside experts could use to poke holes in the concept. Unknowns indeed existed. A well-connected scientist at AT&T would later find a significant weakness in the network version of Clipper, a way to cripple the snoop-on-me-please feature. All in all, Clipper actually emerged as a world security threat. Washington was harming electronic commerce by promoting a crippled and questionable program for encryption. The Administration in effect was delaying the adoption of truly comprehensive security standards for the international community, especially business people outside the States. The standards were on the way, but not as fast as if Clinton’s people hadn’t wreaked havoc on the private sector by way of moronic export controls. “We need strong cryptography for mainstream society on the Net,” Zimmermann told me. “It’s like making locks. It’s as if I were in the business of selling very, very strong locks.” He reminded me of the case of Kevin Mitnick, who was arrested for breaking into scads of computers and stealing oceans of valuable information. The FBI chased him for a couple of years. “Isn’t it ironic that this guy was able to inflict such damage because our systems are so insecure?” Zimmermann asked. “Our own government suppressed the availability of strong encryption technology. They brought it on themselves, or, I should say more accurately, they brought it down on us.” At the same time, through Clipper and through efforts against PGP and other effective software, Washington in effect was lending moral support to dictatorships. Clipper used a technique called _key escrow_. That was a nice way of saying you had to trust Uncle with your secrets since he had a copy of your key. But what if Uncle weren’t Uncle Sam? What if he instead were Uncle Saddam? “You may have the Saddam Husseins of the world, the North Koreans, being able to hang on to power,” Zimmermann said, “by using this technology to oppress their own political opposition.”