From: ckd@eff.org (Christopher Davis)
Subject: EFFector Online 3.1 part 1
Followup-To: comp.org.eff.talk
Organization: Electronic Frontier Foundation Tech Central
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1992 17:03:33 GMT

########## ########## ########## |  RAPID GROWTH OF ONLINE SERVICES  
########## ########## ########## |  ONE BBSCON /EFF LIBRARY/ USENET  
####       ####       ####       |                                   
########   ########   ########   |       JOHN PERRY BARLOW ON        
########   ########   ########   |  THE NSA, THE FBI, ENCRYPTION,    
####       ####       ####       |         AND WIRE-TAPPING          
########## ####       ####       |                                   
########## ####       ####       |         THE TAO TE CHIP           
=====================================================================
EFFector Online             JULY 29, 1992         Issue  3.1 / Part 1
         A Publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation         
                           ISSN 1062-9424                            
=====================================================================

         ONLINE SERVICES EXPERIENCE SOLID GROWTH OVER PAST 5 YEARS
                  WITH MORE FORECAST FOR THE NEAR FUTURE

A new study released by SIMBA Information, a research group based in
Wilton, Connecticut, says sales by online services increased by 61.1
percent in the last five years. The trend will continue over the next five
years, says SIMBA, with a projected increase of 48%.

By 1996, the online information market should be worth about $14.2 billion
annually. Business uses will consume the lion's share of this market by a
factor of 24 to 1. Regardless of this, the services used by consumers were
the fastest growing segment of the market in the 1990-1991 period. This
growth in consumer use is expected to increase by 145 percent over the next
five years.

The report, "Online Services: 1992 Review, Trends, and Forecast" was
written for SIMBA by analyst Chris Elwell.

Other items in the report of interest: Subscribers to online services
numbered 5.4 million at the end of 1991, an increase of 18% over 1990.
Leading online services (CompuServe, Genie, Prodigy, etc.) reported an
aggregate sales growth of nearly 7% in 1991 from 1990 levels.

Some of the more notable conclusions of this report are:
        #North American-based online services account for 57% of 
         worldwide sales,with rapid growth in the near term. 
        #More than half of the growth in online subscribers in 1991
         was accounted for by Prodigy.
        #One out of every five home computers has a modem.
        #As the Regional Bell companies enter the online services
         arena, the initial focal point of their efforts will be
         online directory publishing.
        #Even though the report gives detailed profiles of 35 major
         players, it notes that most online services and database 
         publishers are relatively small operations.

                        -==--==--==-<>-==--==--==-

                        EFF to Crash The ONE BBSCON

         August 13-16, Stouffer Concourse Hotel, Denver Colorado.

The ONE BBSCON is the major BBS conference of the year, hosting seminars in
such topics as How to make your BBS profitable; What is Internet?; FidoNet,
RelayNet, INet, et. al.; Graphics over a Modem; Learn from the Winners; as
well hosting an exhibition attended by vendors of BBS-related products.

And EFF will be there with a booth as well.  We'll be doing the usual
booth-related activities such as handing out literature and selling
t-shirts; however, we're more interested in talking with the members of the
BBS community and learning what it needs from EFF.  Along with seminars on
BBSs and the Law, EFF staff counsel Shari Steele will be presenting a talk
on the EFF at which we will be looking for feedback.  If you'll be
attending, do stop by either the booth or the seminar and tell us what you
think.

For more information on ONE BBSCON, contact
                                       ONE, Inc.
                                       4255 S. Buckley Road
                                       Suite 308
                                       Aurora, Colorado  80013
                                       (303)693-5252
Note: There is no email address. Leaves room for improvement.

                        -==--==--==-<>-==--==--==-

                         UPDATE ON THE EFF LIBRARY

The EFF Library was set up over a year ago when it became clear that,
regardless of the digital revolution, we were being overwhelmed by a wave
of hard copy.  At that time, we had a backlog of around 1,000 documents,
books and magazines concerning issues relevant to the Electronic Frontier.
We engaged a professional librarian, Hae Young Wang, to bring order to
chaos, and to provide us with a method that would enable us to file and
retrieve material necessary to the work of the foundation.

Today, the EFF library in Cambridge houses over 2,300 items. The holdings
cover journal articles, newspaper articles, conference proceedings, court
documents, legislation, magazines, books, and brochures.  The subject areas
include such things as information infrastructure, computers and civil
liberties, intellectual property and copyrights, and EFF archives.

The Library also maintains over 130 subscriptions to magazines and
newsletters.

In addition, the EFF library maintains, classifies and indexes EFF's
anonymous ftp archive files.  These files, which are accessible to everyone
with Internet access, have recently been re-organized into what we hope is a
more user-friendly and informative manner. In the EFF ftp directory, you
can find documents about the EFF, back issues of its online newsletter,
notes on eff-issues, historical items, legal issues, current legislation,
local chapters, and a host of other material germane to the Electronic
Frontier.

While the ftp files are open to all, the EFF Library can now serve only the
staff here and in Washington.  We hope to be able to provide service to EFF
members and the general public in the future, as funding and staffing
allow.

In the meantime, we have recently acquired new scanning software which we
hope will reduce the work involved in moving hard-copy information into
digital form. With this in place we will be adding items to the anonymous
ftp archive at an increased rate throughout the rest of the summer.

Recent additions to the EFF ftp files are:
    The EFF Open Platform Proposal. This is the full text of the
    EFF's plan to create a national public network through the
    deployment of ISDN technology.
    (pub/EFF/papers/open-platform-proposal)

    Howard Rhinegold's "A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community".
    This meditation on what it means to be online in 1992 was
    first serialized in EFFector Online.
    (pub/EFF/papers/cyber/life-in-virtual-community)

    Senator Al Gore's High-Tech Bill (S.2937) as introduced on July
    1, 1992. This bill provides funding to both NSF and NASA to
    develop technology for "digital libraries", huge data bases
    that store text, imagery, video, and sound and are accessible
    over computer networks like NSFNET.  The bill also funds
    development of prototype "digital libraries" around the
    country. This is the full-text of this bill along with the
    press release from Gore's office announcing the bill.
    (pub/EFF/legislation/gore-bill-1992)

    An information packet on the GPO/WINDO legislation before congress
    as S.2813/H.R. 2772. This discusses the function of the proposed
    "gateway" for online public access to government databases. From
    the Taxpayers Assets Project.
    (pub/EFF/legislation/gpo-windo-info)

These files are also available through WAIS as eff-documents.src.  WAIS
clients are available for the Mac, PC, NeXT, X11, and GNU Emacs
environments via anonymous ftp from think.com.  A "guest" WAIS client is
available by telnetting to quake.think.com and logging in as 'wais'.

To retrieve these files via email, send mail to archive-server@eff.org,
containing (in the body of the message) the command

send eff <path from pub/EFF>

So to get the Gore bill, you would send

send eff legislation/gore-bill-1992

If you have any trouble obtaining these documents, send email to
ftphelp@eff.org.

                        -==--==--==-<>-==--==--==-

                        UNCLEAR ON USENET INTERNET?

Veteran members of the Internet know, through osmosis, the difference
between Internet and Usenet. Still, newcomers are often confused since the
two seem to be, at times, used interchangeably. To provide for an ultimate
answer, we turned to Chris Davis (ckd), star sysadmin at eff.org. He said:

   "The definitive answer is long and mostly uninteresting except to
pedants like me :).

   "The Internet is that collection of connected TCP/IP networks.  Roughly
speaking, if you can connect directly to 'nic.ddn.mil' with telnet, you're
on the Internet.  You may be able to get Internet mail without being on the
Internet proper (say, if you're on America Online).

   "USENET is that set of machines and people who interchange USENET
messages.  A large number of USENET sites are on the Internet, and many
Internet sites get USENET.  Many USENET sites are NOT on the Internet,
however, getting their news via dialup lines, satellite receivers, magnetic
tape shipments (no kidding), and the like.  Roughly speaking, you're on
USENET if you get the 'news.announce.important' newsgroup.

   "They are related in that they are partially congruent and often
confused with each other :) but they are not the same network."

                        -==--==--==-<>-==--==--==-

                       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.

                [continued in Effector Online 3.1  Part 2]

      EFFector Online     JULY 22, 1992    Issue  3.1 / end of Part 1
--
Christopher Davis * ckd@eff.org * System Administrator, EFF * +1 617 864 0665
   ``The First Amendment is often inconvenient.  But that is besides the
  point.  Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation
         to tolerate speech.'' --Justice Anthony Kennedy, in 91-155
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU