"Cryptography is the silver bullet by which we can hope to reclaim our privacy. The solution, however, has one drawback: cryptography shields the law abiding an

"Cryptography is the silver bullet by which we can hope to reclaim our privacy. The solution, however, has one drawback: cryptography shields the law abiding and the lawless equally. Law-enforcement and intelligence agencies contend that if strong codes are widely available, their efforts to protect the public would be paralyzed. So they have come up with a compromise, a way to neutralize such encryption. That's the Clipper chip and that compromise is what the war is about." So there it is, a government-mandated encryption device that has a backdoor built in. The IME is a well-intended system management feature that can be turned to nefarious purposes since it can go around all operating system security features, e.g. read or update all of the system's memory.