Will this number grow into the millions as the Government hopes? Ultimately the answer lies with the American public. Administration officials are confident that when the public contemplates scenarios like the Fortress in the Bronx or the Mushroom Cloud in Lower Manhattan, it will realize that allowing the Government to hold the keys is a relatively painless price to pay for safety and national security. They believe the public will eventually accept it in the same way it now views limited legal wiretapping. But so far the Administration hasn't recruited many prominent supporters. The main one is Dorothy Denning, a crypto expert who heads the computer science department at Georgetown University.

Since endorsing Clipper (and advocating passage of the Digital Telephony initiative) Denning has been savagely attacked on the computer nets. Some of the language would wither a professional wrestler. "I've seen horrible things written about me," Denning says with a nervous smile. "I try to actually now avoid looking at them, because that's not what's important to me. What's important is that we end up doing the right thing with this. It was an accumulation of factors that led me to agree with Clipper, and the two most important areas, to me, are organized crime and terrorism. I was exposed to cases where wiretaps had actually stopped crimes in the making, and I started thinking, 'If they didn't have this tool, some of these things might have happened.' You know, I hate to use the word responsibility, but I actually feel some sense of responsibility to at least state my position to the extent so that people will understand it."

The opponents of Clipper are confident that the marketplace will vote against it. "The idea that the Government holds the keys to all our locks, before anyone has even been accused of committing a crime, doesn't parse with the public," says Jerry Berman, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It's not America."

Senator Leahy hints that Congress might not stand for the Clinton Administration's attempt to construct the key-escrow system, at an estimated cost of $14 million dollars initially and $16 million annually. "If the Administration wants the money to set up and run the key-escrow facilities," he says, "it will need Congressional approval." Despite claims by the National Institute of Standards and Technology deputy director, Raymond G. Kammer, that some foreign governments have shown interest in the scheme, Leahy seems to agree with most American telecommunications and computer manufacturers that Clipper and subsequent escrow schemes will find no favor in the vast international marketplace, turning the United States into a cryptographic island and crippling important industries.

Leahy is also concerned about the Administration's haste. "The Administration is rushing to implement the Clipper chip program without thinking through crucial details," he says. Indeed, although the Government has been buying and using Clipper encryption devices, the process of actually getting the keys out of escrow and using them to decipher scrambled conversations has never been field tested. And there exists only a single uncompleted prototype of the device intended to do the deciphering.

Leahy is also among those who worry that, all policy issues aside, the Government's key escrow scheme might fail solely on technical issues. The Clipper and Capstone chips, while powerful enough to use on today's equipment, have not been engineered for the high speeds of the coming information highway; updates will be required. Even more serious are the potential design flaws in the unproved key-escrow scheme. Matthew Blaze's discovery that wrongdoers could foil wiretappers may be only the first indication that Clipper is unable to do the job for which it was designed. In his paper revealing the glitch, he writes, "It is not clear that it is possible to construct EES (Escrow Encryption Standard) that is both completely invulnerable to all kinds of exploitation as well as generally useful."

At bottom, many opponents of Clipper do not trust the Government. They are unimpressed by the elaborate key-escrow security arrangements outlined for Clipper. Instead, they ask questions about the process by which the Clipper was devised -- how is it that the N.S.A., an intelligence agency whose mission does not ordinarily include consumer electronics design, has suddenly seized a central role in creating a national information matrix? They also complain that the Skipjack cryptographic algorithm is a classified secret, one that cryptographic professionals cannot subject to the rigorous, extended testing that has previously been used to gain universal trust for such a standard.