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.

As the local police department might want to decrypt a phone of a criminal suspect, so would the Chinese or the Russian or the Iranian intelligence agencies like to be able to do exactly the same thing.

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.

So, in 1993, in what was probably the first salvo of the first Crypto War, there was concern coming from the National Security Agency and the FBI that encryption would soon be incorporated into lots of communications devices, and that that would cause wiretaps to go dark. There was not that much commercial use of encryption at that point. Encryption, particularly for communications traffic, was mostly something done by the government.

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.