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DNA109.004
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Wrap
Text File
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1994-08-24
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7KB
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DEFCON - Wiretapping and Privacy
For those of you who didn't attend DEFCON ][ this year, you
missed out on a couple of very interesting speakers. Not the least
of which was Gail Thackeray, whom you may have heard of before. If
you haven't, you should have. She was instrumental in the Operation
Sun-Devil raids, where kids(deviant miscreants) had their computer
equipment stolen(borrowed temporarily to study, and not returned)
from their houses and sometimes businesses. A little background on
the story: The horrible hackers were getting out of hand in
America(and abroad). AT&T suffered an almost total loss of service
with their switches due to a bug in the inter-switch communications
software. Lots of paranoia and misunderstanding led to Op Sun-
Devil, which helped rid America of this communist regime(kids who
toyed with computers). Now that we've delved a little into Gail
Thackeray's past, I want to touch on some on her speech at DEFCON.
First of all, I was impressed with her level of understanding of
technology. She gave a very strong speech, and never lost her focus
despite the moderate heckling she was getting from the crowd. Her
speech centered on privacy in communications, particularly across
the phone line. As I'm sure you're aware, telephone taps are quite
possible, and generally extremely difficult to detect by any means
available. I'm also sure you've heard of the Clipper/Capstone
initiative. I'll discuss it momentarily just for a moment to
refresh your memory however. Clipper is the name for a type of chip
which uses a government encryption algorithm(Skipjack) to encrypt
telephone communications between two parties. It uses public and
private keys, just like the favorite PGP does, with one small
difference. There is a third key, which unlocks both sides of the
traffic in a conversation. This key is used to tap consversations,
and is given to the government. They keep it safe from all the bad
people who you wouldn't like to have it. The idea is that if the
government makes it so you have to get a search warrant to get the
key, nothing could go wrong, right? We'll get back to this in a
while. The government is *not* outlawing other encryption routines
in conjunction with the Clipper initiative, but the thought is that
the government in the future will. No one wants to give the
government the power to dictate what kind of communications we can
and cannot use. That's ridiculously dangerous sounding to me. Kinda
makes me start thinking about the book, 'Brave New World'.
Although she didn't say 'Clipper' much in her speech, Gail was
talking about it almost exclusively. She gave some credible real
world situations where having the ability to tap someone's phone
was a very nice option indeed. She mentioned when a child was
kidnapped, and the phone company refused to trace the call. This
was a bit off the point, but interesting nonetheless. She spoke of
the government's 'right' to tap telephones. I wanted to ask her
which 'rights' she was referring to. As far as I knew, the
government was not given rights, only the people were. As a side
note, watching CNN's Larry King Live a month ago, I saw the VP Al
Gore come on to talk about the Information Super Highway (ISH? No
wonder no-one uses the acronym!). After failing to get his Mac
equipped with Compuserve to load up his mail folder, 'the
technology VP' started fielding questions. One that came up was:
you guessed it! Clipper. He too was stuck referring to the
government's right to invade the privacy of the people it's
supposed to serve. When did the politicians figure we gave them the
rights to do as they pleased. Enough on this subject, I can go off
on rights of the government forever. I have to say one thing about
the ISH as well: IT'S NOT HERE CALIFORNIA! One T-1 link between two
schools *does not* qualify as a network. Try calling up Pac Bell
and asking to be hooked up to the ISH and see what they say. Nuh
huh. Back to Gail's speech! Next she took us through all the
requirements to put a legal wiretap on a phone line. She told us
how LEA's have to fill out lots of paperwork, and convince a judge
that there is a worthwhile reason to tap someone's line. Thackeray
brought up points about how the judge will come down to where the
tap is going on to inspect it, and even tell officers to stop if he
don't think it's worthwhile. She assured us that all these legal
hoops that LEA's had to jump through would ensure that no illegal
wiretapping would go on. The next speaker after Gail mentioned that
approximately 90% of all government wiretaps are illegal, and not
obtained with a warrant. He also mentioned that in his experience,
*no* judge had ever done what Gail Thackeray had just said, and
that typically evidence was just made up to cajole a judge into
agreeing to a wiretap. So much for all that.
OK, let's get an overview from my viewpoint. First of all, the
government has the absolute 'right' to invade any
criminal's(citizen's) privacy if they choose. Those doing the wire-
tapping *must* get a court to agree that a tap is necessary, unless
they don't want to. LEA's have two options. They can falsify
evidence and get a tap, or they can simply ignore the court and do
as they choose. None of this is subject to public scrutiny in any
way. We simply have to 'assume' that things are proceding in a
proper fashion. This is the SAME mechanism that will be holding our
Clipper keys in the future. Any cop who is willing to falsify
evidence about you can get your key and listen in to everything you
have to say. Personally, I don't feel particularly happy about
this. Luckily, the encryption itiative is not being forced upon
us...yet. I'm afraid it may become a de facto standard some time in
the future however. I don't offer any solution to the problem. I leave
that to you...I simply want to inform you of the government's best
arguments for compromising it's citizen's privacy. You have to make
your own conclusions about our govt's policies and motives.
Zephyr [Cosys - Digital Decay] July 26, 1994