Government fear of strong crypto [was Re: Digital Cash$$$$

["Pat Farrell" <pfarrell@cs.gmu.edu>]

Jim McCoy <mccoy@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu> writes:

>                                IMHO, the real
>reason governments are opposed to strong cryptography is that in an
>information society it effectively places the population outside the
>control of the government, the central government becomes superfluous.

I'm not going to disagree that long term, the net makes governments
obsolete, but I think that far fewer folks in the US government have _any_
understanding of the issues arround strong crypto. I spent yesterday at the
"Computer Security Institute" conference in Washington (it is a commercial
educational conference on computer security). Lots of government employees
were there learning about security, products, etc. Most of the products were
virus scanners, sigh.

The "government" as a whole is not against crypto. The NSA is _very
strongly_ against it. There are 60,000 or more bureaucrats in NSA that would
be effectively put out of work by widespread strong crypto. All the
$17 Billion that they use on signal intercepts would go to competing
approachs (satelite recon, spys in the field, etc.) that are controlled by
other agencies. Why? because signal intellegence is so easy now that it is
extremely cheap and cost effective. Widespread strong crypto will not make
evesdropping impossible, but it will make it _very_ expensive in time and
money, and thus make it much less attractive.

Rather than simply ranting about the evils of bureaucrats, think for a
second about their motivation. There is no profit metric for bureaucrats to
rely upon - they have to do their job as well as expected for the least
amount of money. If they fail to deliver, they lose their jobs.  (yes, they
can be fired or reassigned to siberia...) So they spend all their life
making sure that they do a "good enuff" job and follow all the approved
actions. Having Signal intercepts work cheaply and well makes it easy to
keep their jobs.

I believe that the FBI and other more public agencies are simply shills for
NSA. The many posting about real wiretap usage and costs simply can't
support taking all the heat last year of Digital Telophony and this year
over Clipper, esp. when they admit that smart crooks wouldn't bother to use
Clipper.

BTW, I talked to Dorothy Denning at the conference. She says that it is now
called the "Key escrow chip" because of Intergraph's trademark on Clipper.
I'll post more on my conversations with DE Denning later.

Pat

Pat Farrell      Grad Student                 pfarrell@cs.gmu.edu
Department of Computer Science    George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
Public key availble via finger          #include <standard.disclaimer>