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- Decrypting the Puzzle Palace
-
- previously published in the July, 1992 issue of
- Communications of the ACM
-
- by
- John Perry Barlow
-
-
- "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 at
- the time was a long-encamped and immense army of occupation.
-
- This army represents interests which are difficult to define. It guards
- the area against unidentified enemies. It meticulously observes almost
- every activity undertaken there, and continuously prevents most who
- inhabit its domain from drawing any blinds against such observation.
-
- This army 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 the inventive powers of a William
- Gibson. The American Occupation Army of Cyberspace exists. Its name is
- the National Security Agency.
-
- It can be argued that this peculiar institution inhibits free trade, has
- damaged American competitiveness, and poses a threat to liberty anywhere
- people communicate with electrons. Its principal function, as my
- colleague John Gilmore puts it, is "wire-tapping the world." It is free
- to do this 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. 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 aimed at permanently denying privacy to the inhabitants of
- Cyberspace, whether foreign or American.
-
- Finally it seems an opportune time, directly following our disorienting
- victory in the Cold War, to ask if the threats from which the NSA
- purportedly protects Americans from are as significant as the hazards
- the NSA's 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 the NSA was one of the twelve or so shadowy federal
- spook houses erected shortly after the creation of the Iron Curtain with
- the purpose of stopping its advance.
-
- The NSA originated in response to a memorandum sent by Harry Truman on
- October 24, 1952 to Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Defense
- Secretary Robert Lovatt. This memo, the very existence of which remained
- secret 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 belief in the incompetence of all bureaucracies
- continued to mute any sense of alarm. 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 securing privacy in 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 is not very effective in those areas where electronic eaves
- dropping 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 present-day law enforcement apprehension over secure
- cellular encryption provides evidence of how seriously they've been
- taking ECPA. Law enforcement organizations 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 they may be
- willing to paralyze progress in America's most promising technologies
- rather than yield.
-
- 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 very difficult.
-
- In 1991, 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 certain language in Senate Bill 266. The new language
- in the bill required electronic communications services and those who
- created communications devices to implement only such encryption methods
- as would assure government's ability to extract the plain text of any
- voice or data communications in which it took a legal interest. It was
- as if the government had responded to a technological leap in lock
- design by requiring all 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. 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 canUt 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 pragmatic 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. This
- standard is 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 Rdumbing downS 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 isnUt any good.
-
- One cryptographic expert, 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 the 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." (Emphasis
- 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 system 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 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, the NSA 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. DonUt 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 journals 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 the 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 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 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 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, I approached a couple of old hands for a highly
- distilled sample of intelligence culture.
-
- I called Admirals Stansfield Turner and Bobby Ray Inman. Their Carter
- administration positions as, respectively, CIA and NSA Directors, had
- endowed them with considerable experience in such matters In addition,
- both are generally regarded to be somewhat more sensitive to the limits
- of democratic power than their successors. And their successors seemed
- unlikely to return my calls. 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 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.
- Still, he didn't think I was being 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.
-
- 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 disturbed to hear it
- might be purposely 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,"
- Inman 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?
-
- Inman 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 an 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 familiar
- presence of the Soviets, we can expect 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
- keys it wanted.
-
- 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 "practical"
- when it came to pursuing drug dealers and other criminals using cellular
- phones.
-
- In a 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 fear that most would prefer that all electronic
- traffic was open to government decryption."
-
- 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 was clear that this "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 previously allowed.
-
- But the negotiations between the NSA and the SPA were being conducted
- behind closed doors. The NSA imposed an understanding that any agreement
- 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.
-
- Furthermore, some cryptographers worried that the encryption key lengths
- to which the SPA appeared willing to restrict its members might be too
- short for the sorts of brute-force decryption assaults which advances in
- processor technology will yield in the near future. And brute force
- decryption has always been the NSA's strong suit. The impression
- engendered by the style of the NSA-SPA negotiations did not inspire
- confidence. The lack of confidence 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. Bigger
- and bolder than before.
-
- They are contained in a sweeping proposal by the Justice Department to
- the Senate Commerce Committee. It proposes 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."
-
- 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 The Department of 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 cripple the American
- economy. This may sound hyperbolic, but I believe it is not.
-
- The greatest technological advantages this country presently enjoys are
- in the areas of software and telecommunications. Furthermore, thanks in
- large part to the Internet, much of America is already wired for bytes.
- This is 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 fairly 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 intend to work with federal law enforcement officials to address
- their legitimate concerns. We donUt 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.
-
- 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 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
- 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
- Monday, May 4, 1992
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
- The EFF encourages any organization which might have a stake in
- the future of cyberspace 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.
- Washington, DC
-
- I would appreciate hearing those concerns myself. Feel free to copy
- me with those letters at my physical address,
-
- John Perry Barlow
- 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 the EFF's Washington office at:
-
- 666 Pennsylvania Avenue SE,
- Suite 303,
- Washington, DC 20003
- 202/544-9237
-
- 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.
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