The Clipper Chip, and the SkipJack tools based on it, mandated, were a high grade hardware encryption for which the government would hold all the private keys. It had several flaws, and was discarded when it turned out to violated several patents of Silvio Micali, an MIT professor. It also turned out to be possible to generate your own private session key, which the government would not have, by running it for about 45 minutes communicating to another such chip and testing keys until you found one that passed the "Law Enforcement Agency Field" hash check. It was also expensive, about $25/chip.
Unfortunately, Microsoft and the "Palladium" technology, renamed "Trusted Computing", have achieved most of that chip's goals with even less legal protection. The "Trusted Computing" tools used to lock modern computers from booting with unauthorized kernels and built into hardware encryption and DRM for modern Windows systems has pretty much the same capability, with _Microsoft_ holding all the private keys in escrow. They hold the master keys, they hold they key signing keys, and they have the ability to _revoke_ and replace keys on active systems so you cannot even access your own hardware after such a revocation. And there is no direct judicial oversight even _available_ for such a company owned private repository. It's even more dangerous than the central signature authorities for SSL keys, which mostly protect transient communications. It's like a central, corporate owned repository for GPG private keys, along with the ability to rip the keys out of your hardware with normal software security updates.
Amusingly, it has a fundamental and embarrassing technological flaw, much like the Clipper Chip. It can be software emulated in virtualization environments. So the DRM capability, which is a major factor in _funding_ its development, has been made somewhat poiintless. "Trusted Computing" protected documents and especially visual and audio media can have their displayable content tapped from the byte streams of the video and audio outputs.