 
   It was implied in the first technical posting by Dorothy Denning that the
FBI would do the decryption *for* the law enforcement agencies.  It wasn't
clear to me from the post whether this would be done in realtime or not, or
whether the FBI would just decrypt the session keys for the locals, or would
do the whole message.
 
   One thing I'm a bit puzzled by:  Why aren't they doing this with a public
key scheme of some sort?  You could generate two uniqe public/private pairsor
for each chip.  Then, escrow the private keys with the escrow agencies.  Set
the protocol up to encrypt the session key with both public keys.  To decrypt
a message, both escrow agencies (in the right order, for most PK schemes)
have to decrypt with the escrowed private key.  This way, there wouldn't be
thecconcern that, once the police had asked fo  a warrant/wiretap, they
would have your key forver.