From: 34AEJ7D@CMUVM.CSV.CMICH.EDU
Newsgroups: alt.drugs
Subject: Big Brother is ALWAYS watching!
Keywords: NSA PGP privacy encryption crypt cipher spook snook rights risks
Date: 31 Jul 92 13:57:47 GMT
Reply-To: bj496%Cleveland.Freenet.Edu@CMUVM.CSV.CMICH.EDU

The following may be of interest to those concerned with issues of E-mail
(or any kind of) privacy, as discussed here in the PGP thread recently.

W. K. Gorman

For info on the EFF, try E-mail to <listserv@eff.org>
------------------------------------
|=====================================================================
|EFFector Online             JULY 29, 1992         Issue  3.1 / Part 1
|         A Publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
|                           ISSN 1062-9424
|=====================================================================
|...
|                        -==--==--==-<>-==--==--==-
|
|                       Decrypting the Puzzle Palace
|                                    by
|                             John Perry Barlow
|                              barlow@eff.org
|
|                       "A little sunlight is the best disinfectant."
|                                            --Justice Louis Brandeis
|
|Over a year ago, in a condition of giddier innocence than I enjoy today, I
|wrote the following about the discovery of Cyberspace:
|
|"Imagine discovering a continent so vast that it may have no other side.
|Imagine a new world with more resources than all our future greed might
|exhaust, more opportunities than there will ever be entrepreneurs enough to
|exploit, and a peculiar kind of real estate which expands with
|development."
|
|One less felicitous feature of this terrain which I hadn't noticed then is
|what seems to be a long-encamped and immense army of occupation.
|
|This army represents interests which are difficult to define, guards the
|area against unidentified enemies, meticulously observes almost every
|activity undertaken there, and continuously prevents most who inhabit its
|domain from drawing any blinds against such observation.
|
|It marshals at least 40,000 troops, owns the most advanced computing
|resources in the world, and uses funds the dispersal of which does not fall
|under any democratic review.
|
|Imagining this force won't require from you the inventive powers of a
|William Gibson. The American Occupation Army of Cyberspace exists.  Its
|name is the National Security Agency.
|
|It may be argued that this peculiar institution inhibits free trade, has
|directly damaged American competitiveness, and poses a threat to liberty
|anywhere people communicate with electrons. It's principal function, as
|miff colleague John Gilmore puts it, is "wire-tapping the world," which it
|is free to do without a warrant from any judge.
|
|It is legally constrained from domestic surveillance, but precious few
|people are in a good position to watch what, how, or whom the NSA watches.
|And those who are tend to be temperamentally sympathetic to its objectives
|and methods. They like power, and power understands the importance of
|keeping it own secrets and learning everyone else's.
|
|Whether it is meticulously ignoring every American byte or not, the NSA is
|certainly pursuing policies which will render our domestic affairs
|transparent to anyone who can afford big digital hardware.  Such policies
|could have profound consequences on our liberty and privacy.
|
|More to point, the role of the NSA in the area of domestic privacy needs to
|be assessed in the light of other recent federal initiatives which seem
|directly aimed at permanently denying privacy to the inhabitants of
|Cyberspace, whether foreign or American.
|
|Finally it seems a highly opportune time, directly following our
|disorienting victory in the Cold War, to ask if the threats from which the
|NSA purportedly protects us from are as significant as the hazards its
|activities present.
|
|Like most Americans I'd never given much thought to the NSA until recently.
|(Indeed its very existence was a secret for much of my life. Beltway types
|used to joke that NSA stood for "No Such Agency.")
|
|I vaguely knew that it was another of the 12 or so shadowy federal spook
|houses which were erected shortly after the Iron Curtain with the purpose
|of stopping its further advance. It derives entirely from a memorandum sent
|by Harry Truman on October 24, 1952 to Secretary of State Dean Acheson and
|Defense Secretary Robert Lovatt. This memo, the official secrecy of which
|remained unpenetrated for almost 40 years, created the NSA, placed it under
|the authority of the Secretary of Defense, and charged it with monitoring
|and decoding any signal transmission relevant to the security of the United
|States.
|
|Even after I started noticing the NSA, my natural immunity to paranoia
|combined with a general belief in the incompetence of all bureaucracies...
|especially those whose inefficiencies are unmolested by public scrutiny...
|to mute any sense of alarm. But this was before I began to understand the
|subterranean battles raging over data encryption and the NSA's role in
|them. Lately, I'm less sanguine.
|
|Encryption may be the only reliable method for conveying privacy to the
|inherently public domain of Cyberspace. I certainly trust it more than
|privacy protection laws. Relying on government to protect your privacy is
|like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.
|
|In fact, we already have a strong-sounding federal law protecting our
|electronic privacy, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act or ECPA. But
|this law has not particular effective in those areas were electronic
|eavesdropping is technically easy. This is especially true in the area of
|cellular phone conversations, which, under the current analog transmission
|standard, are easily accessible to anyone from the FBI to you.
|
|The degree of law enforcement apprehension over secure cellular encryption
|provides mute evidence of how seriously they've been taking ECPA. They are
|moving on a variety of fronts to see that robust electronic privacy
|protection systems don't become generally available to the public. Indeed,
|the current administration may be so determined to achieve this end that
|they may be willing to paralyze progress in America's most promising
|technologies rather than yield on it.
|
|Push is coming to shove in two areas of communications technology: digital
|transmission of heretofore analog signals and the encryption of transmitted
|data.
|
|As the communications service providers move to packet switching, fiber
|optic transmission lines, digital wireless, ISDN and other advanced
|techniques, what have been discrete channels of continuous electrical
|impulses, voices audible to anyone with alligator clips on the right wires,
|are now becoming chaotic blasts of data packets, readily intelligible only
|to the sender and receiver. This development effectively forecloses
|traditional wire-tapping techniques, even as it provides new and different
|opportunities for electronic surveillance.
|
|It is in the latter area where the NSA knows its stuff. A fair percentage
|of the digital signals dispatched on planet Earth must pass at some point
|through the NSA's big sieve in Fort Meade, Maryland, 12 underground acres
|of the heaviest hardware in the computing world. There, unless these
|packets are also encrypted with a particularly knotty algorithm, sorting
|them back into their original continuity is not so difficult.
|
|Last spring, alarmed at a future in which it would have to sort through an
|endless fruit salad of encrypted bits, the FBI persuaded Senator Joseph
|Biden to include language in Senate Bill 266 which would have directed
|providers of electronic communications services and devices (such as
|digital cellular phone systems or other multiplexed communications
|channels) to implement only such encryption methods as would assure
|governmental ability to extract from the data stream the plain text of any
|voice or data communications in which it took a legal interest. It was if
|the government had responded to a technological leap in lock design by
|requiring building contractors to supply it with skeleton keys to every
|door in America.
|
|The provision raised wide-spread concern in the computer community, which
|was better equipped to understand its implications than the general public,
|and in August of last year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in
|cooperation with Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and other
|industry groups, successfully lobbied to have it removed from the bill.
|
|Our celebration was restrained. We knew we hadn't seen the last of it. For
|one thing, the movement to digital communications does create some serious
|obstacles to traditional wire-tapping procedures. I fully expected that law
|enforcement would be back with new proposals, which I hoped might be ones
|we could support. But what I didn't understand then, and am only now
|beginning to appreciate, was the extent to which this issue had already
|been engaged by the NSA in the obscure area of export controls over data
|encryption algorithms.
|
|Encryption algorithms, despite their purely defensive characteristics, have
|been regarded by the government of this country as weapons of war for many
|years. If they are to be employed for privacy (as opposed to
|authentication) and they are any good at all, their export is licensed
|under State Department's International Traffic in Arms Regulations or ITAR.
|
|The encryption watchdog is the NSA. It has been enforcing a policy, neither
|debated nor even admitted to, which holds that if a device or program
|contains an encryption scheme which the NSA can't break fairly easily, it
|will not be licensed for international sale.
|
|Aside for marveling at the silliness of trying to embargo algorithms, a
|practice about as practicable as restricting the export of wind, I didn't
|pay much attention to the implications of NSA encryption policies until
|February of this year.  It was then that I learned about the deliberations
|of an obscure group of cellular industry representatives called the Ad Hoc
|Authentication Task Force, TR45.3 and of the influence which the NSA has
|apparently exercised over their findings.
|
|In the stately fashion characteristic of standard-setting bodies, this
|group has been working for several years on a standard for digital cellular
|transmission, authentication, and privacy protection to be known by the
|characteristically whimsical telco moniker IS-54B.
|
|In February they met near Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, NJ. At that
|meeting, they recommended, and agreed not to publish, an encryption scheme
|for American-made digital cellular systems which many sophisticated
|observers believe to be intentionally vulnerable.  It was further thought
|by many observers that this "dumbing down" had been done indirect
|cooperation with the NSA.
|
|Given the secret nature of the new algorithm, its actual merits were
|difficult to assess. But many cryptologists believe there is enough in the
|published portions of the standard to confirm that it isn't any good.
|
|One cryptographic expert, one of two I spoke with who asked not to be
|identified lest the NSA take reprisals against his company, said:
|
|"The voice privacy scheme, as opposed to the authentication scheme, is
|pitifully easy to break. It involves the generation of two "voice privacy
|masks" each 260 bits long. They are generated as a byproduct of the
|authentication algorithm and remain fixed for the duration of a call. The
|voice privacy masks are exclusive_ORed with each frame of data from the
|vocoder at the transmitter. The receiver XORs the same mask with the
|incoming data frame to recover the original plain text.  Anyone familiar
|with the fundamentals of cryptanalysis can easily see how weak this scheme
|is."
|
|And indeed, Whitfield Diffie, co-inventor of Public Key cryptography and
|arguably the dean of this obscure field, told me this about the fixed
|masks:
|
|"Given that description of the encryption process, there is no need for the
|opponents to know how the masks were generated. Routine cryptanalytic
|operations will quickly determine the masks and remove them.''
|
|Some on committee claimed that possible NSA refusal of export licensing had
|no bearing on the algorithm they chose. But their decision not to publish
|the entire method and expose it to cryptanalytical abuse (not to mention
|ANSI certification) was accompanied by the following convoluted
|justification:
|
|"It is the belief of the majority of the Ad Hoc Group, based on our current
|understanding of the export requirements, that a published algorithm would
|facilitate the cracking of the algorithm to the extent that its fundamental
|purpose is defeated or compromised."(Italics added.)
|
|Now this is a weird paragraph any way you parse it, but its most singular
|quality is the sudden, incongruous appearance of export requirements in a
|paragraph otherwise devoted to algorithmic integrity. In fact, this
|paragraph is itself code, the plain text of which goes something like this:
|"We're adopting this algorithm because, if we don't, the NSA will slam an
|export embargo on all domestically manufactured digital cellular phones."
|
|Obviously, the cellular phone systems manufacturers and providers are not
|going to produce one model for overseas sale and another for domestic
|production. Thus, a primary effect of NSA-driven efforts to deny some
|unnamed foreign enemy secure cellular communications is on domestic
|security. The wireless channels available to private Americans will be
|cloaked in a mathematical veil so thin that, as one crypto-expert put it,
|"Any county sheriff with the right PC-based black box will be able to
|monitor your cellular conversations."
|
|When I heard him say that, it suddenly became clear to me that, whether
|consciously undertaken with that goal or not, the most important result of
|the NSA's encryption embargoes has been the future convenience of domestic
|law enforcement. Thanks to NSA export policies, they will be assured that,
|as more Americans protect their privacy with encryption, it will be of a
|sort easily penetrated by authority.
|
|I find it increasingly hard to imagine this is not their real objective as
|well. Surely, they must be aware of how ineffectual their efforts have been
|in keeping good encryption out of inimical military possession. An
|algorithm is somewhat less easily stopped at the border than, say, a
|nuclear reactor. As William Neukom, head of Microsoft Legal puts it, "The
|notion that you can control this technology is comical."
|
|I became further persuaded that this was the case upon hearing, from a
|couple of sources, that the Russians have been using the possibly
|uncrackable (and American) RSA algorithm in their missile launch codes for
|the last ten years and that, for as little as five bucks, one can get a
|software package called Crypto II on the streets of Saint Petersburg which
|includes both RSA and DES encryption systems.
|
|Nevertheless, the NSA has been willing to cost American business a lot of
|revenue rather than allow domestic products with strong encryption into the
|global market.
|
|While it's impossible to set a credible figure on what that loss might add
|up to, it's high. Jim Bidzos, whose RSA Data Security licenses RSA, points
|to one major Swiss bid in which a hundred million dollar contract for
|financial computer terminals went to a European vendor after American
|companies were prohibited by the NSA from exporting a truly secure network.
|
|The list of export software containing intentionally broken encryption is
|also long. Lotus Notes ships in two versions. Don't count on much
|protection from the encryption in the export version.  Both Microsoft and
|Novell have been thwarted in their efforts to include RSA in their
|international networking software, despite frequent publication of the
|entire RSA algorithm in technical publications all over the world.
|
|With hardware, the job has been easier. NSA levied against the inclusion of
|a DES chip in the AS/390 series IBM mainframes in late 1990 despite the
|fact that, by this time, DES was in widespread use around the world,
|including semi-official adoption by our official enemy, the USSR.
|
|I now realize that Soviets have not been the NSA's main concern at any time
|lately. Naively hoping that, with the collapse of the Evil Empire, the NSA
|might be out of work, I then learned that, given their own vigorous crypto
|systems and their long use of some embargoed products, the Russians could
|not have been the threat from whom this forbidden knowledge was to be kept.
|Who has the enemy been then? I started to ask around.
|
|Cited again and again as the real object of the embargoes were Third-World
|countries. terrorists and... criminals. Criminals, most generally
|drug-flavored, kept coming up, and nobody seemed terribly concerned that
|some of their operations might be located in areas supposedly off-limits to
|NSA scrutiny.
|
|Presumably the NSA is restricted from conducting American surveillance by
|both the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) and a series
|of presidential directives, beginning with one issued by President Ford
|following Richard Nixon's bold misuse of the NSA, in which he explicitly
|directed the NSA to conduct widespread domestic surveillance of political
|dissidents and drug users.
|
|But whether or not FISA has actually limited the NSA's abilities to conduct
|domestic surveillance seemed less relevant the more I thought about it. A
|better question to ask was, "Who is best served by the NSA's encryption
|export policies?" The answer is clear: domestic law enforcement. Was this
|the result of some spook plot between NSA and, say, the Department of
|Justice? Not necessarily.
|
|Certainly in the case of the digital cellular standard, cultural congruity
|between foreign intelligence, domestic law enforcement, and what somebody
|referred to as "spook wannabes on the TR45.3 committee" might have a lot
|more to do with the its eventual flavor than any actual whisperings along
|the Potomac.
|
|Unable to get anyone presently employed by the NSA to comment on this or
|any other matter and with little opportunity to assess the NSA's
|congeniality toward domestic law enforcement from the inside, I
|approached a couple of old hands for a highly distilled sample of
|intelligence culture.
|
|I called Admirals Stansfield Turner and Bobby Ray Inman. Not only had their
|Carter administration positions as, respectively, CIA and NSA Directors,
|endowed them with considerable experience in such matters, both are
|generally regarded to be somewhat more sensitive to the limits of
|democratic power than their successors. None of whom seemed likely to
|return my calls anyway.
|
|My phone conversations with Turner and Inman were amiable enough, but they
|didn't ease my gathering sense that the NSA takes an active interest in
|areas which are supposedly beyond its authorized field of scrutiny.
|
|Turner started out by saying he was in no position to confirm or deny any
|suspicions about direct NSA-FBI cooperation on encryption, but he didn't
|think I was being exactly irrational in raising the question.  In fact, he
|genially encouraged me to investigate the matter further.
|
|He also said that while a sub rosa arrangement between the NSA and the
|Department of Justice to compromise domestic encryption would be
|"injudicious," he could think of no law, including FISA (which he helped
|design), which would prevent it.
|
|Most alarmingly, this gentleman who has written eloquently on the hazards
|of surveillance in a democracy did not seem terribly concerned that our
|digital shelters are being rendered permanently translucent by and to the
|government.
|
|He said, "A threat could develop...terrorism, narcotics, whatever...where
|the public would be pleased that all electronic traffic was open to
|decryption. You can't legislate something which forecloses the possibility
|of meeting that kind of emergency."
|
|Admiral Inman had even more enthusiasm for assertive governmental
|supervision. Although he admitted no real knowledge of the events behind
|the new cellular encryption standard, he wasn't the least disturbed to hear
|that it might be flawed.
|
|And, despite the fact that his responsibilities as NSA Director had been
|restricted to foreign intelligence, he seemed a lot more comfortable
|talking about threats on the home front.
|
|"The Department of Justice," he began, "has a very legitimate worry.  The
|major weapon against white collar crime has been the court-ordered wiretap.
|If the criminal elements go to using a high quality cipher, the principal
|defense against narcotics traffic is gone."  This didn't sound like a guy
|who, were he still head of NSA, would rebuff FBI attempts to get a little
|help from his agency.
|
|He brushed off my concerns about the weakness of the cellular encryption
|standard. "If all you're seeking is personal privacy, you can get that with
|a very minimal amount of encipherment."
|
|Well, I wondered, Privacy from whom?
|
|And he seemed to regard real, virile encryption to be something rather like
|a Saturday Night Special.  "My answer," he said, "would be legislation
|which would make it a criminal offense to use encrypted communication to
|conceal criminal activity."
|
|Wouldn't that render all encrypted traffic automatically suspect? I asked.
|
|"Well, he said, "you could have a registry of institutions which can
|legally use ciphers. If you get somebody using one who isn't registered,
|then you go after him."
|
|You can have my encryption algorithm, I thought to myself, when you pry my
|cold dead fingers from its private key.
|
|It wasn't a big sample, but it was enough to gain a better appreciation of
|the cultural climate of the intelligence community.  And these guys are the
|liberals. What legal efficiencies might their Republican successors be
|willing to employ to protect the American Way?
|
|Without the comfortably familiar presence of the Soviets to hate and fear,
|we can expect to see a sharp increase in over-rated bogeymen and virtual
|states of emergency. This is already well under way. I think we can expect
|our drifting and confused hardliners to burn the Reichstag repeatedly until
|they have managed to extract from our induced alarm the sort of government
|which makes them feel safe.
|
|This process has been under way for some time. One sees it in the war on
|terrorism, against which pursuit "no liberty is absolute," as Admiral
|Turner put it. This, despite the fact that, during last year for which I
|have a solid figure, 1987, only 7 Americans succumbed to terrorism.
|
|You can also see it clearly under way in the War on Some Drugs. The Fourth
|Amendment to the Constitution has largely disappeared in this civil war.
|And among the people I spoke with, it seemed a common canon that drugs (by
|which one does not mean Jim Beam, Marlboros, Folger's, or Halcion) were a
|sufficient evil to merit the government's holding any more keys it felt the
|need for.
|
|One individual close to the committee said that at least some of the
|aforementioned "spook wannabes" on the committee were "interested in weak
|cellular encryption because they considered warrants not to be "practical"
|when it came to pursuing drug dealers and other criminals using cellular
|phones."
|
|In a miscellaneously fearful America, where the people cry for shorter
|chains and smaller cages, such privileges as secure personal communications
|are increasingly regarded as expendable luxuries. As Whitfield Diffie put
|it, "From the consistent way in which Americans seem to put security ahead
|of freedom, I rather fear that most of them would prefer that all
|electronic traffic was open to government decryption right now if they had
|given it any thought."
|
|In any event, while I found no proof of an NSA-FBI conspiracy to gut the
|American cellular phone encryption standard, it seemed clear to me that
|none was needed. The same results can be delivered by a cultural
|"auto-conspiracy" between like-minded hardliners and cellular companies who
|will care about privacy only when their customers do.
|
|You don't have to be a hand-wringing libertarian like me to worry about the
|domestic consequences of the NSA's encryption embargoes.  They are also, as
|stated previously, bad for business, unless, of course, the business of
|America is no longer business but, as sometimes seems the case these days,
|crime control.
|
|As Ron Rivest (the "R" in RSA) said to me, "We have the largest information
|based economy in the world. We have lots of reasons for wanting to protect
|information, and weakening our encryption systems for the convenience of
|law enforcement doesn't serve the national interest."
|
|But by early March, it had become clear that this supposedly business-
|oriented administration had made a clear choice to favor cops over commerce
|even if the costs to the American economy were to become extremely high.
|
|A sense of White House seriousness in this regard could be taken from their
|response to the first serious effort by Congress to bring the NSA to task
|for its encryption embargoes. Rep. Mel Levine (D-Calif.)  proposed an
|amendment to the Export Administration Act to transfer mass market software
|controls to the Commerce Department, which would relax the rules. The
|administration responded by saying that they would veto the entire bill if
|the Levine amendment remained attached to it.
|
|Even though it appeared the NSA had little to fear from Congress, the
|Levine amendment may have been part of what placed the agency in a
|bargaining mood for the first time. They entered into discussions with the
|Software Publishers Association who, acting primarily on behalf of
|Microsoft and Lotus, got to them to agree "in principle" to a streamlined
|process for export licensing of encryption which might provide for more
|robust standards than have been allowed previously.
|
|But the negotiations between the NSA and the SPA were being conducted
|behind closed doors, with the NSA-imposed understanding that any agreement
|they reached would be set forth only in a "confidential" letter to
|Congress. As in the case of the digital cellular standard, this would
|eliminate the public scrutiny by cryptography researchers which anneals
|genuinely hardened encryption.
|
|Furthermore, some cryptographers worried that the encryption key lengths to
|which the SPA appeared willing to restrict its member publishers might be
|too short to provide much defense against the sorts of brute-force
|decryption assaults which advances in processor technology will yield in
|the fairly near future. And brute force has always been the NSA's strong
|suit.
|
|Whether accurate or not, the impression engendered by the style of the
|NSA-SPA negotiations was not one of unassailable confidence. The lack of it
|will operate to the continued advantage of foreign manufacturers in an era
|when more and more institutions are going to be concerned about the privacy
|of their digital communications.
|
|But the economic damage which the NSA-SPA agreement might cause would be
|minor compared to what would result from a startling new federal
|initiative, the Department of Justice's proposed legislation on digital
|telephony. If you're wondering what happened to the snooping provisions
|which were in Senate Bill 266, look no further. They're back. And they're
|bigger and bolder than ever.
|
|They are contained in a sweeping proposal which have been made by the
|Justice Department to the Senate Commerce Committee for legislation which
|would "require providers of electronic communications services and private
|branch exchanges to ensure that the Government's ability to lawfully
|intercept communications is unimpeded by the introduction of advanced
|digital telecommunications technology or any other telecommunications
|technology."
|
|Amazingly enough, this really means what it says: before any advance in
|telecommunications technology can be deployed, the service providers and
|manufacturers must assure the cops that they can tap into it. In other
|words, development in digital communications technology must come to a
|screeching halt until Justice can be assured that it will be able to grab
|and examine data packets with the same facility they have long enjoyed with
|analog wire-tapping.
|
|It gets worse. The initiative also provides that, if requested by the
|Attorney General, "any Commission proceeding concerning regulations,
|standards or registrations issued or to be issued under authority of this
|section shall be closed to the public." This essentially places the
|Attorney General in a position to shut down any telecommunications advance
|without benefit of public hearing.
|
|When I first heard of the digital telephony proposal, I assumed it was a
|kind of bargaining chip. I couldn't imagine it was serious. But it now
|appears they are going to the mattresses on this one.
|
|Taken together with NSA's continued assertion of its authority over
|encryption, a pattern becomes clear. The government of the United States is
|so determined to maintain law enforcement's traditional wire-tapping
|abilities in the digital age that it is willing to fundamentally cripple
|the American economy to do so. This may sound hyperbolic, but I believe it
|is not.
|
|The greatest technology advantage this country presently enjoys is in the
|areas of software and telecommunications. Furthermore, thanks in large part
|to the Internet, much of America is already wired for bytes, as significant
|an economic edge in the Information Age as the existence of a railroad
|system was for England one hundred fifty years ago.
|
|If we continue to permit the NSA to cripple our software and further convey
|to the Department of Justice the right to stop development the Net without
|public input, we are sacrificing both our economic future and our
|liberties. And all in the name of combating terrorism and drugs.
|
|This has now gone far enough. I have always been inclined to view the
|American government as pretty benign as such creatures go. I am generally
|the least paranoid person I know, but there is something scary about a
|government which cares more about putting its nose in your business than it
|does about keeping that business healthy.
|
|As I write this, a new ad hoc working group on digital privacy, coordinated
|by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is scrambling to meet the challenge.
|The group includes representatives from organizations like AT&T, the
|Regional Bells, IBM, Microsoft, the Electronic Mail Association and about
|thirty other companies and public interest groups.
|
|Under the direction of Jerry Berman, EFF's Washington office director, and
|John Podesta, a capable lobbyist and privacy specialist who helped draft
|the ECPA, this group intends to stop the provisions in digital telephony
|proposal from entering the statute books.
|
|We also intend to work with federal law enforcement officials to address
|their legitimate concerns. We don't dispute their need to conduct some
|electronic surveillance, but we believe this can be assured by more
|restrained methods than they're proposing.
|
|We are also preparing a thorough examination of the NSA's encryption export
|policies and looking into the constitutional implications of those
|policies. Rather than negotiating behind closed doors, as the SPA has been
|attempting to do, America's digital industries have a strong self-interest
|in banding together to bring the NSA's procedures and objectives into the
|sunlight of public discussion.
|
|Finally, we are hoping to open a dialog with the NSA. We need to develop a
|better understanding of their perception of the world and its threats. Who
|are they guarding us against and how does encryption fit into that
|endeavor? Despite our opposition to their policies on encryption export, we
|assume that NSA operations have some merit. But we would like to be able to
|rationally balance the merits against the costs.
|
|We strongly encourage any organization which might have a stake in the
|future of digital communication to become involved. Letters expressing your
|concern may be addressed to: Sen. Ernest Hollings, Chairman, Senate
|Commerce Committee, U.S. Senate, Washington, DC and to Don Edwards,
|Chairman, Subcommitee on Constitutional Rights, House Judiciary Committee.
|(I would appreciate hearing those concerns myself. Feel free to copy me
|with those letters at my physical address, c/o P.O. Box 1009, Pinedale, WY
|82941 or in Cyberspace, barlow@eff.org.)
|
|If your organization is interested in becoming part of the digital privacy
|working group, please contact EFF's Washington office at: 666 Pennsylvania
|Avenue SE, Suite 303, Washington, DC 20003, 202/544- 9237, FAX:
|202/547-5481. EFF also encourages individuals interested in these issues to
|join the organization. Contact us at: Electronic Frontier Foundation, 155
|Second Street, Cambridge, MA 02141,617/864- 0665, eff-request@eff.org.
|
|The legal right to express oneself is meaningless if there is no secure
|medium through which that expression may travel. By the same token, the
|right to hold certain unpopular opinions is forfeit unless one can discuss
|those opinions with others of like mind without the government listening in.
|
|Even if you trust the current American government, as I am still largely
|inclined to, there is a kind of corrupting power in the ability to create
|public policy in secret while assuring that the public will have little
|secrecy of its own.
|
|In its secrecy and technological might, the NSA already occupies a very
|powerful position. And conveying to the Department of Justice what amounts
|to licensing authority for all communications technology would give it a
|control of information distribution rarely asserted over English-speaking
|people since Oliver Cromwell's Star Chamber Proceedings.
|
|Are there threats, foreign or domestic, which are sufficiently grave to
|merit the conveyance of such vast legal and technological might?  And even
|if the NSA and FBI may be trusted with such power today, will they always
|be trustworthy? Will we be able to do anything about it if they aren't?
|
|Senator Frank Church said of NSA technology in 1975 words which are more
|urgent today:
|
|"That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people
|and no American would have any privacy left. There would be no place to
|hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, the technological capacity
|that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to
|impose total tyranny. There would be no way to fight back, because the most
|careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no
|matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to
|know. Such is the capacity of this technology."
|
|San Francisco, California
|May, 1992
|
|Reprinted from Communications of the ACM, June 1992
|by permission of the author
|...
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