Another important message about the future of YOUR privacy from spying
eyes at NSA, CIA, FBI, your local sherrif ...
Read the following article from WIRED magazine, entitled
"Jackboots on the Infobahn" for more insight on the impending Clipper
debacle. By the way, I OPPOSE CLIPPER! I support any efforts to kill the
clipper initiative, digital telephony, and lift the export embargo on
encryption products.
Please READ, DISTRIBUTE, and ACT! There are e-mail addresses you can
send to in the text.
Matt
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WIRED 2.04
Electrosphere
Jackboots on the Infobahn
Clipper is a last ditch attempt by the United States, the last great power
from the old Industrial Era, to establish imperial control over cyberspace.
By John Perry Barlow
[Note: The following article will appear in the April 1994 issue of WIRED.
We, the editors of WIRED, are net-casting it now in its pre-published form as
a public service. Because of the vital and urgent nature of its message, we
believe readers on the Net should hear and take action now. You are free to
pass this article on electronically; in fact we urge you to replicate it
throughout the net with our blessings. If you do, please keep the copyright
statements and this note intact. For a complete listing of Clipper-related
resources available through WIRED Online, send email to with the following
message: "send clipper.index". - The Editors of WIRED]
On January 11, I managed to schmooze myself aboard Air Force 2. It was flying
out of LA, where its principal passenger had just outlined his vision of the
information superhighway to a suited mob of television, show- biz, and cable
types who fervently hoped to own it one day - if they could ever figure out
what the hell it was.
From the standpoint of the Electronic Frontier Foundation the speech had been
wildly encouraging. The administration's program, as announced by Vice
President Al Gore, incorporated many of the concepts of open competition,
universal access, and deregulated common carriage that we'd been pushing for
the previous year.
But he had said nothing about the future of privacy, except to cite among the
bounties of the NII its ability to "help law enforcement agencies thwart
criminals and terrorists who might use advanced telecommunications to commit
crimes."
On the plane I asked Gore what this implied about administration policy on
cryptography. He became as noncommittal as a cigar-store Indian. "We'll be
making some announcements.... I can't tell you anything more." He hurried to
the front of the plane, leaving me to troubled speculation.
Despite its fundamental role in assuring privacy, transaction security, and
reliable identity within the NII, the Clinton administration has not
demonstrated an enlightenment about cryptography up to par with the rest of
its digital vision.
The Clipper Chip - which threatens to be either the goofiest waste of federal
dollars since President Gerald Ford's great Swine Flu program or, if actually
deployed, a surveillance technology of profound malignancy - seemed at first
an ugly legacy of the Reagan-Bush modus operandi. "This is going to be our
Bay of Pigs," one Clinton White House official told me at the time Clipper
was introduced, referring to the disastrous plan to invade Cuba that Kennedy
inherited from Eisenhower.
(Clipper, in case you're just tuning in, is an encryption chip that the
National Security Agency and FBI hope will someday be in every phone and
computer in America. It scrambles your communications, making them
unintelligible to all but their intended recipients. All, that is, but the
government, which would hold the "key" to your chip. The key would separated
into two pieces, held in escrow, and joined with the appropriate "legal
authority.")
Of course, trusting the government with your privacy is like having a Peeping
Tom install your window blinds. And, since the folks I've met in this White
House seem like extremely smart, conscious freedom-lovers - hell, a lot of
them are Deadheads - I was sure that after they were fully moved in, they'd
face down the National Security Agency and the FBI, let Clipper die a natural
death, and lower the export embargo on reliable encryption products.
Furthermore, the National Institutes of Standards and Technology and the
National Security Council have been studying both Clipper and export
embargoes since April. Given that the volumes of expert testimony they had
collected overwhelmingly opposed both, I expected the final report would give
the administration all the support it needed to do the right thing.
I was wrong. Instead, there would be no report. Apparently, they couldn't
draft one that supported, on the evidence, what they had decided to do
instead.
The Other Shoe Drops
On Friday, February 4, the other jackboot dropped. A series of announcements
from the administration made it clear that cryptography would become their
very own "Bosnia of telecommunications" (as one staffer put it). It wasn't
just that the old Serbs in the National Security Agency and the FBI were
still making the calls. The alarming new reality was that the invertebrates
in the White House were only too happy to abide by them. Anything to avoid
appearing soft on drugs or terrorism.
So, rather than ditching Clipper, they declared it a Federal Data Processing
Standard, backing that up with an immediate government order for 50,000
Clipper devices. They appointed the National Institutes of Standards and
Technology and the Department of Treasury as the "trusted" third parties that
would hold the Clipper key pairs. (Treasury, by the way, is also home to such
trustworthy agencies as the Secret Service and the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, and Firearms.)
They reaffirmed the export embargo on robust encryption products, admitting
for the first time that its purpose was to stifle competition to Clipper. And
they outlined a very porous set of requirements under which the cops might
get the keys to your chip. (They would not go into the procedure by which the
National Security Agency could get them, though they assured us it was
sufficient.)
They even signaled the impending return of the dread Digital Telephony, an
FBI legislative initiative requiring fundamental reengineering of the
information infrastructure; providing wiretapping ability to the FBI would
then become the paramount design priority.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Actually, by the time the announcements thudded down, I wasn't surprised by
them. I had spent several days the previous week in and around the White
House.
I felt like I was in another remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. My
friends in the administration had been transformed. They'd been subsumed by
the vast mindfield on the other side of the security clearance membrane,
where dwell the monstrous bureaucratic organisms that feed on fear. They'd
been infected by the institutionally paranoid National Security Agency's
Weltanschauung.
They used all the telltale phrases. Mike Nelson, the White House point man on
the NII, told me, "If only I could tell you what I know, you'd feel the same
way I do." I told him I'd been inoculated against that argument during
Vietnam. (And it does seem to me that if you're going to initiate a process
that might end freedom in America, you probably need an argument that isn't
classified.)
Besides, how does he know what he knows? Where does he get his information?
Why, the National Security Agency, of course. Which, given its strong
interest in the outcome, seems hardly an unimpeachable source.
However they reached it, Clinton and Gore have an astonishingly simple bottom
line, to which even the future of American liberty and prosperity is
secondary: They believe that it is their responsibility to eliminate, by
whatever means, the possibility that some terrorist might get a nuke and use
it on, say, the World Trade Center. They have been convinced that such plots
are more likely to ripen to hideous fruition behind a shield of encryption.
The staffers I talked to were unmoved by the argument that anyone smart
enough to steal a nuclear device is probably smart enough to use PGP or some
other uncompromised crypto standard. And never mind that the last people who
popped a hooter in the World Trade Center were able to get it there without
using any cryptography and while under FBI surveillance.
We are dealing with religion here. Though only ten American lives have been
lost to terrorism in the last two years, the primacy of this threat has
become as much an article of faith with these guys as the Catholic conviction
that human life begins at conception or the Mormon belief that the Lost Tribe
of Israel crossed the Atlantic in submarines.
In the spirit of openness and compromise, they invited the Electronic
Frontier Foundation to submit other solutions to the "problem" of the nuclear-
enabled terrorist than key escrow devices, but they would not admit into
discussion the argument that such a threat might, in fact, be some kind of
phantasm created by the spooks to ensure their lavish budgets into the post-
Cold War era.
As to the possibility that good old-fashioned investigative techniques might
be more valuable in preventing their show-case catastrophe (as it was after
the fact in finding the alleged perpetrators of the last attack on the World
Trade Center), they just hunkered down and said that when wiretaps were
necessary, they were damned well necessary.
When I asked about the business that American companies lose because of their
inability to export good encryption products, one staffer essentially
dismissed the market, saying that total world trade in crypto goods was still
less than a billion dollars. (Well, right. Thanks more to the diligent
efforts of the National Security Agency than to dim sales potential.)
I suggested that a more immediate and costly real-world effect of their
policies would be to reduce national security by isolating American commerce,
owing to a lack of international confidence in the security of our data
lines. I said that Bruce Sterling's fictional data-enclaves in places like
the Turks and Caicos Islands were starting to look real-world inevitable.
They had a couple of answers to this, one unsatisfying and the other scary.
The unsatisfying answer was that the international banking community could
just go on using DES, which still seemed robust enough to them. (DES is the
old federal Data Encryption Standard, thought by most cryptologists to be
nearing the end of its credibility.)
More frightening was their willingness to counter the data-enclave future
with one in which no data channels anywhere would be secure from examination
by one government or another. Pointing to unnamed other countries that were
developing their own mandatory standards and restrictions regarding
cryptography, they said words to the effect of, "Hey, it's not like you can't
outlaw the stuff. Look at France."
Of course, they have also said repeatedly - and for now I believe them - that
they have absolutely no plans to outlaw non-Clipper crypto in the US. But
that doesn't mean that such plans wouldn't develop in the presence of some
pending "emergency." Then there is that White House briefing document, issued
at the time Clipper was first announced, which asserts that no US citizen "as
a matter of right, is entitled to an unbreakable commercial encryption
product."
Now why, if it's an ability they have no intention of contesting, do they
feel compelled to declare that it's not a right? Could it be that they are
preparing us for the laws they'll pass after some bearded fanatic has gotten
himself a surplus nuke and used something besides Clipper to conceal his
plans for it?
If they are thinking about such an eventuality, we should be doing so as
well. How will we respond? I believe there is a strong, though currently
untested, argument that outlawing unregulated crypto would violate the First
Amendment, which surely protects the manner of our speech as clearly as it
protects the content.
But of course the First Amendment is, like the rest of the Constitution, only
as good as the government's willingness to uphold it. And they are, as I say,
in the mood to protect our safety over our liberty.
This is not a mind-frame against which any argument is going to be very
effective. And it appeared that they had already heard and rejected every
argument I could possibly offer.
In fact, when I drew what I thought was an original comparison between their
stand against naturally proliferating crypto and the folly of King Canute
(who placed his throne on the beach and commanded the tide to leave him dry),
my government opposition looked pained and said he had heard that one almost
as often as jokes about roadkill on the information superhighway.
I hate to go to war with them. War is always nastier among friends.
Furthermore, unless they've decided to let the National Security Agency
design the rest of the National Information Infrastructure as well, we need
to go on working closely with them on the whole range of issues like access,
competition, workplace privacy, common carriage, intellectual property, and
such. Besides, the proliferation of strong crypto will probably happen
eventually no matter what they do.
But then again, it might not. In which case we could shortly find ourselves
under a government that would have the automated ability to log the time,
origin and recipient of every call we made, could track our physical
whereabouts continuously, could keep better account of our financial
transactions than we do, and all without a warrant. Talk about crime
prevention!
Worse, under some vaguely defined and surely mutable "legal authority," they
also would be able to listen to our calls and read our e-mail without having
to do any backyard rewiring. They wouldn't need any permission at all to
monitor overseas calls.
If there's going to be a fight, I'd rather it be with this government than
the one we'd likely face on that hard day.
Hey, I've never been a paranoid before. It's always seemed to me that most
governments are too incompetent to keep a good plot strung together all the
way from coffee break to quitting time. But I am now very nervous about the
government of the United States of America.
Because Bill 'n' Al, whatever their other new-paradigm virtues, have allowed
the very old-paradigm trogs of the Guardian Class to define as their highest
duty the defense of America against an enemy that exists primarily in the
imagination - and is therefore capable of anything.
To assure absolute safety against such an enemy, there is no limit to the
liberties we will eventually be asked to sacrifice. And, with a Clipper Chip
in every phone, there will certainly be no technical limit on their ability
to enforce those sacrifices.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
Get Congress to Lift the Crypto Embargo
The administration is trying to impose Clipper on us by manipulating market
forces. By purchasing massive numbers of Clipper devices, they intend to
induce an economy of scale which will make them cheap while the export
embargo renders all competition either expensive or nonexistent.
We have to use the market to fight back. While it's unlikely that they'll
back down on Clipper deployment, the Electronic Frontier Foundation believes
that with sufficient public involvement, we can get Congress to eliminate the
export embargo.
Rep. Maria Cantwell, D-Washington, has a bill (H.R. 3627) before the Economic
Policy, Trade, and Environment Subcommittee of the House Committee on Foreign
Affairs that would do exactly that. She will need a lot of help from the
public. They may not care much about your privacy in DC, but they still care
about your vote.
Please signal your support of H.R. 3627, either by writing her directly or e-
mailing her at cantwell(_at_)eff(_dot_)org(_dot_) Messages sent to that address
will be
printed out and delivered to her office. In the subject header of your
message, please include the words "support HR 3627." In the body of your
message, express your reasons for supporting the bill. You may also express
your sentiments to Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana, the House Committee on
Foreign Affairs chair, by e-mailing hamilton(_at_)eff(_dot_)org(_dot_)
Furthermore, since there is nothing quite as powerful as a letter from a
constituent, you should check the following list of subcommittee and
committee members to see if your congressional representative is among them.
If so, please copy them your letter to Rep. Cantwell.
Economic Policy, Trade, and Environment Subcommittee:
Democrats: Sam Gejdenson (Chair), D-Connecticut; James Oberstar, D-
Minnesota; Cynthia McKinney, D-Georgia; Maria Cantwell, D-Washington; Eric
Fingerhut, D-Ohio; Albert R. Wynn, D-Maryland; Harry Johnston, D-Florida;
Eliot Engel, D-New York; Charles Schumer, D-New York.
Republicans: Toby Roth (ranking), R-Wisconsin; Donald Manzullo, R-Illinois;
Doug Bereuter, R-Nebraska; Jan Meyers, R-Kansas; Cass Ballenger, R-North
Carolina; Dana Rohrabacher, R-California.
House Committee on Foreign Affairs:
Democrats: Lee Hamilton (Chair), D-Indiana; Tom Lantos, D-California; Robert
Torricelli, D-New Jersey; Howard Berman, D-California; Gary Ackerman, D-New
York; Eni Faleomavaega, D-Somoa; Matthew Martinez, D- California; Robert
Borski, D-Pennsylvania; Donal Payne, D-New Jersey; Robert Andrews, D-New
Jersey; Robert Menendez, D-New Jersey; Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio; Alcee Hastings,
D-Florida; Peter Deutsch, D-Florida; Don Edwards, D-California; Frank
McCloskey, D-Indiana; Thomas Sawyer, D-Ohio; Luis Gutierrez, D-Illinois.
Republicans: Benjamin Gilman (ranking), R-New York; William Goodling, R-
Pennsylvania; Jim Leach, R-Iowa; Olympia Snowe, R-Maine; Henry Hyde, R-
Illinois; Christopher Smith, R-New Jersey; Dan Burton, R-Indiana; Elton
Gallegly, R-California; Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Florida; David Levy, R-New
York; Lincoln Diaz-Balart, R-Florida; Ed Royce, R-California.
Boycott Clipper Devices and the Companies Which Make Them.
Don't buy anything with a Clipper Chip in it. Don't buy any product from a
company that manufactures devices with Big Brother inside. It is likely that
the government will ask you to use Clipper for communications with the IRS or
when doing business with federal agencies. They cannot, as yet, require you
to do so. Just say no.
Learn About Encryption and Explain the Issues to Your Unwired Friends
The administration is banking on the likelihood that this stuff is too
technically obscure to agitate anyone but nerds like us. Prove them wrong by
patiently explaining what's going on to all the people you know who have
never touched a computer and glaze over at the mention of words like
"cryptography."
Maybe you glaze over yourself. Don't. It's not that hard. For some hands-on
experience, download a copy of PGP - Pretty Good Privacy - a shareware
encryption engine which uses the robust RSA encryption algorithm. And learn
to use it.
Get Your Company to Think About Embedding Real Cryptography in Its Products
If you work for a company that makes software, computer hardware, or any kind
of communications device, work from within to get them to incorporate RSA or
some other strong encryption scheme into their products. If they say that
they are afraid to violate the export embargo, ask them to consider
manufacturing such products overseas and importing them back into the United
States. There appears to be no law against that. Yet.
You might also lobby your company to join the Digital Privacy and Security
Working Group, a coalition of companies and public interest groups -
including IBM, Apple, Sun, Microsoft, and, interestingly, Clipper phone
manufacturer AT&T - that is working to get the embargo lifted.
Enlist!
Self-serving as it sounds coming from me, you can do a lot to help by
becoming a member of one of these organizations. In addition to giving you
access to the latest information on this subject, every additional member
strengthens our credibility with Congress.
Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation by writing
membership(_at_)eff(_dot_)org(_dot_)
Join Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility by e-mailing
cpsr(_dot_)info(_at_)cpsr(_dot_)org(_dot_) CPSR is also organizing a protest,
to which you can lend
your support by sending e-mail to clipper(_dot_)petition(_at_)cpsr(_dot_)org
with "I oppose
Clipper" in the message body.
To go to a CPSR Archive click on one of the following links:
? FTP
? Gopher
In his LA speech, Gore called the development of the NII "a revolution." And
it is a revolutionary war we are engaged in here. Clipper is a last ditch
attempt by the United States, the last great power from the old Industrial
Era, to establish imperial control over cyberspace. If they win, the most
liberating development in the history of humankind could become, instead, the
surveillance system which will monitor our grandchildren's morality. We can
be better ancestors than that.
San Francisco, California
Wednesday, February 9, 1994
* * *
John Perry Barlow (barlow(_at_)eff(_dot_)org) is co-founder and Vice-Chairman
of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group which defends liberty, both in
Cyberspace and the Physical World. He has three daughters.
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