It's only after you get down into the technical weeds - and they are admittedly rather weedy - that it becomes clear that this is much harder than it seems and not something we're going to be able to solve.

I believed then, and continue to believe now, that the benefits to our security and freedom of widely available cryptography far, far outweigh the inevitable damage that comes from its use by criminals and terrorists. I believed, and continue to believe, that the arguments against widely available cryptography, while certainly advanced by people of good will, did not hold up against the cold light of reason and were inconsistent with the most basic American values.

As we build systems that are more and more complex, we make more and more subtle but very high-impact mistakes. As we use computers for more things and as we build more complex systems, this problem of unreliability and insecurity is actually getting worse, with no real sign of abating anytime soon.

The security of computers and the Internet is a horrible and dangerous mess. Every week we hear about breaches of databases of Social Security numbers and financial information and health records, and about critical infrastructure being insecure.

Computer science doesn't know how to build complex systems that work reliably. This has been a well-understood problem since the very beginning of programmable computers.

Clipper took a relatively simple problem, encryption between two phones, and turned it into a much more complex problem, encryption between two phones but that can be decrypted by the government under certain conditions and, by making the problem that complicated, that made it very easy for subtle flaws to slip by unnoticed. I think it demonstrated that this problem is not just a tough public policy problem, but it's also a tough technical problem.

On balance, the use of encryption, just like the use of good locks on doors, has the net effect of preventing a lot more crime than it might assist.