Faced with the "charge" of selling out the govt, by "supporting Clipper" (more specifically for granting a license to them to use RSA's patented encryption in the key escrow scheme [as far as I can tell; I don't read legalese too well]), RSADSI/PKP's head Jim Bidzos responds thusly: Quoth Jim Bidzos, verily I saith unto thee:
From jim@RSA.COM Wed Jun 16 15:37:37 1993 id <AA12154>; Wed, 16 Jun 1993 15:37:34 -0600 Date: Wed, 16 Jun 93 14:35:49 PDT From: jim@RSA.COM (Jim Bidzos) Message-Id: <9306162135.AA17052@RSA.COM> To: anton@hydra.unm.edu In-Reply-To: Stanton McCandlish's message of Wed, 16 Jun 1993 13:26:42 -0600 (MDT) <9306161926.AA06434@hydra.unm.edu> Subject: hmph
Well, I don't know where these things get discussed, but you can certainly feel free to resend or post my email to you. I'm genuinely confused, as I believe the situation is as simple as I put it to you. Our claims of patent infringement by DSS, made over the last 18 months, were well-known and publicized. NIST has capitulated. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
BTW, on Clipper, ATT, Motorola, IBM could have done Clipper without ever talking to us. Contrary to popular belief, we don't dictate terms to licensees. So, with their RSA or Diffie-Hellman licenses, these companies could have simply replaced DES with Clipper (continuing to use RSA for Clipper key management) and supported Clipper without ever talking to us. (In fact, I believe this is exactly what ATT did, as they had a DH/DES phone before they "joined" the Clipper club.) Clipper will not fail or succeed because of any Public-key patent license. It will go away simply because it was ill-conceived, ill-timed, and undesirable.
--Jim
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