Village Voice article on Cypherpunks

[fergp@sytex.com (Paul Ferguson)]

reprinted without permission from the Village Voice:
 
The Village Voice
August 3, 1993
Vol. 38, No. 31
pages 33 through 37
 
 
Code Warriors
 
Battling for the Keys to Privacy in the Info Age
by Julian Dibbell
 
 
It's difficult enough to say what the Information Age is. let
alone when it began. But if forced to name a starting point, you
could probably do worse than pick the moment the United States
government decided to declare children's drawings contraband.
 
The time was World War II, and the rationale, as with many of the
U.S. government's more surreal policy decisions, was national
security. Military censors, charged with weeding secret
communications from the international mails, feared the tremulous
lines of toddler art might too easily hide the contours of a
spy-drawn map, and so, rather than examine every grandparent-bound
masterpiece that crossed their desks, they chose to forbid the
public from sending them at all. The censors raised similar
objections to the mailing of crossword puzzles -- who knew what
messages might lurk in their solutions? So crossword puzzles too
were placed on the interdiction list -- as were student
transcripts, postal chess games, song requests phoned into radio
stations, and any floral orders that specified the kind of
flowers to be delivered. Wherever information signified to
unpredictably, too quirkily, too privately, the censors shut down
the flow. And where they couldn't ban outright,, they meddled;
the stamps on letters were routinely rearranged so as to scramble
any coded order; affectionate X's and O's were excised at random;
knitting instructions were held up long enough to produce and
analyze the resulting sweater; and on at least one occasion the
dials were spun on an entire shipment of watches, obliterating
whatever hidden meaning might have resided in the placement of
the hands.
 
State paranoia has always thrived in wartime, of course, but the
fear of secret writing that gripped the government during World
War II was something novel. Like the war itself, this fear was
total, projecting sinister meaning onto the full spread of
communications -- all the random traces of love and commerce,
study and play, hobbies and enthusiasms, that register a
society's transactions. Taking arms against this entropic haze of
human details and differences, the state got a taste of life in a
world oversaturated with information, the kind of world whose
central challenge is to snatch elusive signals from the jaws of
ever-proliferating noise. Today, we who live increasingly in just
such a world might diagnose the censor's panic response as a
simple, if dramatic, case of information anxiety -- that sinking
sense that buried somewhere in the overwhelming chaos of mediated
data surrounding us lie messages of life-or-death importance. But
back then the panic was something more: it was the premonition of
a dizzying new cultural order on the brink of emergence. It was,
like so many paranoid visions before it, a prophecy.
 
And a self-fulfilling one at that. For the wartime struggle
against secret communications didn't just envision the
Information Age -- it invented it, in a literal and technological
sense. The world's first digital electronic computer, after all,
was created by Alan Turing and a team of British scientists in
the war's grim early days, for the express and ultimately
successful purpose of cracking the German's key Enigma cipher.
Likewise, Bell engineer Claude Shannon's momentous postwar
discovery of the foundations of information theory -- a
sophisticated mathematical abstraction of the dynamic between
chaos (noise) and intelligibility (signal) in communications
channels -- was directly related to his ground-breaking war work
in cryptology -- the wickedly complex theory and practice of
codes and ciphers. And between computers and the high-speed
networks made possible in part by Shannon's insights, the
necessary tools for the info-saturation of society were in place.
Half a century later, the business pages like to portray the
emergent digital universe as a gift from the Apples and AT&Ts and
Time Warners of the world, brought to you in the name of
efficiency, entertainment, and, above all, profit. But ride the
information superhighway back to its ultimate sources and you end
up in the heat and dust of World War II's secret-code battles.
 
It's hardly an accident, then, that as the future foreseen in the
censor's cryptophobic nightmares approaches fruition, the code
wars are heating up again. As digital networks have evolved, the
technology of secrecy has evolved along with them, and just like
the computers that populate those networks, it has gotten
radically personal. Thanks to advances in practical cryptography,
anyone who wants it now has the ability to scramble their
communications into a digital hash readable by no one but the
intended recipient -- and increasing numbers of commercial and
individual computer user do want it. No longer the exclusive
domain of soldiers and diplomats, automated encryption systems so
powerful no government can break them now fit snugly into
software easily installed on any home computer. If the spread of
civilian encryption continues unabated, the day may soon come
when wiretap-addicted law-enforcers and the deep-dished
eavesdroppers in the National Security Agency find themselves
stripped forever of their accustomed power to penetrate the noise
the rest of us make just to talk to each other.
 
Terrified once again of an information landscape pregnant with
unreadable messages, the government is moving to head off this
new bad dream before it becomes a reality. On April 16 of this
year, the Clinton administration announced the development (by
the National Institute of Standards and Technology, with
"guidance" from the NSA's tight-lipped code-breaking gurus) of an
encrypting microchip designed for use in telephones, powerful
enough to thwart most intruders but rigged so that cops and other
warranted government agents can tap in to the encrypted
communications at will.
 
The White House presented the new system (code-named Clipper -- a
chip for computer modems, called Capstone, is soon to follow) as
a Solomonic compromise between the growing demand for
communications privacy and "the legitimate needs of law
enforcement," but its effect so far has been anything but
pacifying. Clipper's announcement brought to boil a
long-simmering battle between the state security establishment
and an accidental confederacy of high-tech business interests,
civil libertarians, and guerrilla cryptographers. It's been
blazing openly ever since, in online discussion groups, in
congressional committee groups, in the pages of The New York
Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, and a slew of computer
trade magazines, with the Clipper chip at its center but with
much more than the fate of a cleverly etched silicon wafer at
stake. "The future of privacy in America" might best sum up the
usual understanding of what the fight is about, but even that
phrase seems inadequate given how far the warp-speed evolution of
information technology is stretching the very meaning of privacy.
Better, then, to say simply that if secret codes tell us where
the Information Age began, they may also hold an answer to the
difficult question of what it is. Or even, perhaps, to the still
more challenging one of what it could be.
 
"You can get further away in cyberspace than you could in going
to Alpha Centauri," says Tim May, and he should know. Before he
retired seven years ago, a wealthy man at age 34, May was a
reasonably illustrious corporate physicist. Now he's a
Cypherpunk, part of a loose-knit band of scrappy,
libertarian-leaning computer jockeys who have dedicated
themselves to perfecting  and promoting the art of disappearing
into the virtual hinterlands. Concentrated in Silicon Valley but
spread out across the country and as far away as Finland, the
Cypherpunks maintain daily e-mail contact, collaboratively
creating and distributing practical software answers to modern
cryptography's central question: How to wrap a piece of digital
information in mathematical complexity so dense only literally
astronomical expenditures of computer time can breach it?
 
"Some of these things sound like just a bunch of fucking
numbers," May explains. "But what they really are is they're
things which in computability space take more energy to get to
than to drive a car to Andromeda. I'm not kidding. I mean, you
can work the math out yourself."
 
Well no, you probably can't, but even those unversed in rocket
science can appreciate the social value of such calculations. As
computer-driven technology comes more and more to mediate
people's connections to society -- and as computers grow in their
abilities to store and sift the information generated by those
connections -- it gets harder for individuals to escape the
prying attentions of state and corporate bureaucracies. Medical
records, credit histories, spending patterns, life stories --
these are being swept up by the millions into a massively
connected web of chatty, chip-laden consumer toys and
institutional data factories, all of them potential informers on
the individuals whose lives pass through them. With every new
info-tech plaything that shows up under society's Christmas tree,
the hydra-headed surveillance machine moves in a little closer,
snuggling up to our skin and our wallets and intensifying the
urge to flee, to find a far-off, secret place to hide in.
 
Cryptography's power to carve such places out of the very
structure of cyberspace is its obvious selling point -- and
further evidence of computers; textbook-dialectical tendency to
offer liberatory solutions for every oppressive situation they
create. Yet, while the privacy afforded by cryptography seems to
be the main reason the Cypherpunks gather in its name, not all of
them see privacy as an end in itself. The most farsighted see it
as a beginning, a first step toward reshaping society in the
image of computer networks themselves: decentralized, fluid,
fault-tolerant, a fuzzy, nonhierarchical unity of autonomous
nodes.
 
"Cryptography is a greater equalizer than the Colt .45, " says
Eric Hughes, the long-haired, cowboy-hatted, and not entirely
lapsed Mormon who, along with may, conceived the Cypherpunks just
seven months before the Clipper hit the fan. "These are
power-leveling techniques," he adds, pointing out that the
hermetically sealed voice-and-data channels that could arm every
citizen against state wire-surveillance are just the simplest of
the crypto toys the Cypherpunks are playing with. Anonymous
remailers are another -- labyrinths of forwarding computers
through which encoded e-mail messages bounce, confounding any
attempt to trace them back to their sources and thus providing an
impenetrable anonymity ideal for whistleblowers and other
transgressors of local codes of silence, from Mafia turncoats to
isolated members od stigmatized sexual minorities. Building on
encryption and remailers, experimental digital cash schemes test
the possibility of untraceable electronic transactions, the basic
ingredient for unregulated worldwide information markets, where a
brisk commerce in trade secrets could spell doom for the
corporation as we know it. Hopelessly untaxable, such
crypto-markets, if they grew large enough, could also critically
sap the economic strength of governments. All of these mechanism,
then, conjured into existence by myriad small desires for simple
privacy, would tend on a large scale to siphon power away from
the huge, impersonal concentrations it likes to gather in. Five
years ago Tim May came up with a name for this vision of a
networked society brought to the brink of ungovernability by the
ubiquity of secret codes. He calls it "crypto-anarchy."
 
The U.S. government, on the other hand, has not yet dared call
it treason, but its Clipper maneuver does appear to be a step in
that direction. Hughes' comparison of encryption to firearms is
one of the Cypherpunks; favorite rhetorical moves, but for the
feds, cryptography's status as weaponry is more than a metaphor
-- national export laws classify encryption hardware and software
as munitions, right alongside tanks and artillery -- and the
agenda of the Cypherpunks and other crypto-privacy advocates
looks like the info-political equivalent of passing out Uzis on
street corners. Small wonder, then, that the opening move in the
government's preemptive counterrevolution works so much like gun
control: Clipper is in essence a system for registering dangerous
info-weapons, requiring the logging of every chip's secret key
with the government at the time of manufacture. The key would
then be split in two and the halves turned over for safekeeping
to two separate and "trustworthy" non-law enforcement agencies
(yet to be designated) till such a time as the government gets
the urge to take a peek.
 
So far, however, the government has refrained from mandating use
of the Clipper chip by law -- the feds claim they're counting on
government-wide use of the chip to coax its adoption by the
market as an exclusive standard. But it's hard to imagine this
inherently compromised system beating out more secure competition
even among the most law-abiding consumers, and never mind the
terrorists, drug dealers, mafiosi, and child pornographers
Clipper is meant to protect us from. In the end, then, the only
way to make the Clipper system universal would be to pass a law
against all other forms of encryption, an option the
administration has coyly admitted it's weighing.
 
But the opposition has been weighing it too. On the Cypherpunk's
mailing list, on the high-volume Usenet newsgroups like
sci.crypt, and in briefs and testimony filed at Representative
Edward Markey's congressional hearings on computer security
policy in June, critics of the Clipper chip have amassed a
heaping list of problems with the move toward crypto
criminalization that the proposal represents.  Economic. political,
and legal arguments have all been hurled at the possibility of an
anti-encryption law, but the most basic difficulty with such a ban
seems to be an essential epistemological one: namely, that
there's almost no way of knowing what the law prohibits, since in
practice it's rarely easy to tell the difference between
encrypted information and random noise. Indeed, the gist of
Claude Shannon's formative contribution to crypto theory was that
the most effective encryption systems are those whose output most
closely resembles raw static, drained as much as possible of the
structure that makes their hidden messages intelligible. Any
serious ban on cryptography would therefore have to go to the
rather loopy extreme of prohibiting the transmission of garbage
data as well.
 
Yet even so sweeping a law couldn't overcome the laws of
information theory, which say that communication channels are
always infected with a certain amount of ineradicable fuzz.
Crypto-heads are already seeking out and finding ways to exploit
this omnipresence of noise -- for instance by removing the bits
representing barely detectable hiss in sound recordings and
replacing them with virtually indistinguishable cipherdata. As
Tim May likes to point out, a DAT cassette of a Michael Jackson
album could thus easily conceal the digitized blueprints of the
Stealth bomber, and in fact it's more than likely that among the
thousands of photographs currently flowing through computer
networks, at least a few go bearing the secret communications of
amateur and not-so-amateur cryptographers, stowed away as digital
blur. Who knows then? If the campaign against nonstandard
encryption proceeds to its logical conclusions, the government
might one day find itself again looking with suspicion on the
transport of children's drawings -- or children's records,
children's videos, or for that matter any of the dense and
digitized info-chunks that will fill the fiber-optic supply lines
of tomorrow's bit-peddling markets.
 
But the potential for absurdity is just one of the forces lined
up against crypto control (and probably the weakest, given the
government's historic taste for absurdity in its communications
policy). The Constitution may be another. Since Clipper's public
debut, cyber-rights groups like Computer Professionals for Social
Responsibility and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have raised
questions about the system's legality, drawing out the
privacy-protecting implications buried in the Fourth and Fifth
Amendment freedoms from unreasonable search and seizure and
self-incrimination. And ultimately, as EFF counsel Mike Godwin
has suggested, any government regulation of cryptography may even
fall to the First Amendment arguments -- though courts have
historically excluded certain categories of speech from the
amendment's protection, unintelligible statements have never been
among them, and the government would probably have a hard time
showing why statements made unintelligible by mathematical
scrambling should be treated any less generously.
 
These are airy, theoretical objections, though, compared to the
howls coming from the quarter most immediately threatened by the
Clipper scheme: American business, especially the sector of it
that's already making money meeting the growing demand for
digital security, which stands to pay dearly if the government's
plans go through. For one thing, products with Clipper tech built
in will be worthless for export purposes -- in the currently
warming climate of industrial espionage, no foreign company in
its right mind would buy security the U.S. owns a master key to.
More ominously, domestic firms saddled with Clipper in their own
offices will be more vulnerable to spying than they might
otherwise, since the back door built in to the chip presents an
obvious soft spot for hackers to attack. Thus, the computer and
communications industries' anti-Clipper campaign has argued, the
chip may in the end do more to subvert the post-Cold War era's
new economically defined national security than to safeguard it.
And while an appeal to the notion that what's good for business
is good for America may not seem as principled as citing the Bill
of Rights, it's probably the argument that weighed heaviest in
the decision two months ago by the NIST -- the federal organ
charged with implementing the Clipper plan -- to ease up on the
program pending broader public review.
 
Moving quickly into the resulting breach, an ad hoc industry
group led by Novell Inc. announced mid July that it was
introducing its own set of encoding standards -- back-doorless
and cryptographically ironclad. The government's so far
acquiescent response ("I think this won't drive us crazy," one
unnamed White House honcho told the Times) is an encouraging sign
for the anti-Clipper coalition. But it's not much more than that;
this battle is far from over and its outcome is far from clear.
If only because of the massive bureaucratic bulk behind the
proposed standard (its patron the NSA has, to the best of
anyone's knowledge, the largest budget by far of any federal
intelligence agency), the government isn't likely to drop it.
Clipper might survive through sheer inertia, and if it does its
effects on widespread use of cryptography could be much more
devastating than its patent impracticality suggests.
 
Why? Because the spread of unbreakable personal crypto depends
heavily on what's known as the FAX Effect -- i.e., the fact that
the value of a given communications system increases in direct
proportion to the number of people of use it. So even though the
government will never succeed in keeping top-grade encryption out
of the hands of criminals and anyone who believes passionately in
its use, the vast majority of digital citizens might never adopt
strong crypto systems if government pressures make it even
moderately inconvenient to use or market them. Merely perfunctory
enforcement of key-registration laws could do the trick, but
legal measures of any kind might not even be necessary. If the
government simply sticks with its current strategy of tempting
manufacturers with a huge, ready-made federal market for
Clipper-equipped technology, then genuinely secure cryptography
could end up playing Beta to Clipper's VHS. At which point the
digital-info industries, would no doubt drop their current
freedom-fighter stance and get with the government program.
 
There's nothing inevitable about this scenario, of course --
except perhaps its preview of rapidly shifting battle formations
among the factions involved. The crypto wars won't end when the
Clipper debate does, and as they rage across the culture their
shape will change with that of the underlying terrain. For
instance, as the personal data of consumers grows more and more
valuable to information-hungry businesses, corporate America will
become an increasingly unreliable friend to any technology that
hides data. Likewise, civil libertarians, pure of heart though
they may be, will remain an effective force only as long  as the
case for strong crypto can be translated into constitutional
terms -- an easy enough trick while the government has its heavy
hand in the matter, but harder to pull off once the contest moves
out into the open marketplace of competing standards.
 
In the long run, then, the core resistance in the hard fight for
crypto-privacy will likely come from people whose commitment
rests not purely on economic self-interest or on larger social
concerns but also on a fascination with the intricate
machinery of cryptography itself. In other words, people like
Phil Zimmerman -- the free-lance programmer and political
activist who grew up engrossed with secret codes and then went on
to dedicate his leisure time writing and updating PGP, a free
e-mail encoding program that is rapidly becoming the encryption
system of choice among the cryptosocially aware. Or people like
Tim May, and Eric Hughes, and all the other technojargon-slinging
Cypherpunks. People whose relationship to cryptography has grown
so personal they cannot bear the thought of not having direct
access to its full power right from their desktops.
 
This army of hobbyists may not seem like the most formidable
agents of revolution. Yet in a time that demands increasingly
subtle understanding of the relationship between technology and
social transformation, their passionate intimacy with
revolutionary gadgetry is helping shape crucial strategies for
change. The Cypherpunks and their ilk are elaborating the latest
variation on the digital counterculture's Hacker Ethic, a
technoactivist outlook that crosswires commonplace theories of
how technology and society interact, buying neither the
technological determinism of pocket-protected engineers and glib
sub-McLuhanites nor the humanist line that technology is mere
putty in the grip of contending social forces. Hackers, who know
firsthand both technology's enthralling power and its empowering
malleability, tend instead toward a creative juggling of the two
opposing outlooks.
 
And Cypherpunks are hackers to the bone. :Encryption always
wins," Tim May insists with the serene confidence of one
convinced he's a mere conduit for historical tendencies built
into information technology itself -- and yet by definition no
Cypherpunk takes the ultimate achievement of the group's goal for
granted. A pragmatic activism hardwires the group's collective
identity, their very motto ("Cypherpunks write code") signals a
commitment to making the proliferation of cryptographic tools
happen now rather than waiting on big business, big science, or
Big Brother to determine its fate. Nor is this commitment limited
to the creation of tools; indeed, an even better motto might be
"Cypherpunks use code," since the essence of the revolution the
'punks seek to effect lies in making encryption a cultural habit,
as common and acceptable as hiding letters inside envelopes. Thus
the Cypherpunks' almost religious use of PGP and of their use
their own primitive remailer systems isn't just a grown-ups' game
of cloak and dagger, as it sometimes seems, or a matter of
testing out the crypto hackers' experimental creations. It's an
attempt to nudge ciphertech toward that pivotal accumulation of
users that finally makes the forward rush of the technology's
far-reaching social implications irresistible.
 
At some stage of the game, in other words, encryption does not
always win. But whether we as a society choose to play the game
is another matter. The Cypherpunks have made their choice, but
should the rest of us necessarily follow them in it? The time to
decide is now, because if public use of crypto-ware ever reaches
that elusive critical mass, debate won't be an option:
crypto-anarchy will be upon us, woven into the technological
fabric of daily life and about as easy to give up as breathing.
The resulting flood of privacy into politic will no doubt do the
body good, but it's worth considering whether the side effects
will in the end outweigh the benefits. Anonymous networks flushed
with digital cash, for instance, may dilute the power of
corporations, but they will also nurture extortion schemes,
bribery, and even brazen markets in no-strings-attached contract
murder. Less luridly, but perhaps more significantly, the
untaxability od enciphered transactions in an economy
increasingly composed od such transactions might wither whatever
mechanisms for meaningful sharing of social responsibilities
remain in this country. This prospect tends not to bother
Cypherpunks, at least not the hippie-hacker millionaires among
them, but libertarians less enchanted with marketocracy may end
up wondering whether crypto-anarchy, for all its power-leveling
potential, is quite the freedom they're fighting for.
 
It's no use to try and answer these doubts with the cheerful
counterresponsibilities -- with visions of the small-town,
closeted queer boy who explores sex and identity without fear of
discovery in a worldwide, cipher-secured on-line community of his
peers, or of cryptographically armored reproductive-rights info
networks standing by to keep choice alive in the event of a
sudden and drastic rightward lurch in national abortion policy.
For every heartwarmer a corresponding bummer can doubtless be
found -- the digital dialectic swings both ways, after all. The
option for strong cryptography, therefore, ultimately requires a
leap of faith, an intuitive confidence that a society which
unflinchingly honors the right to make illegible noise on the
whole be more just, more free, and more exciting than one that
doesn't.
 
For what it's worth, that confidence comes easier all the time.
More and more, the Information Age is looking more or less like
the hype doctors want you to think it is: the most radical
extension of minds and bodies into representational space since
humans first learned to talk.  What it could become, however, is
not nearly as clear. Will it be a time of unimaginably refined
surveillance and control of those minds and bodies? Or a time of
freely and furiously propagating connections among them?  To
suggest that the answer  depends on the failure or success of
unbreakable personal cryptography flirts recklessly with the
romance of the technological fix. But given the deeply
technological nature of the challenge, it's hard to imagine what
kind of fix could be more appropriate. Then again, given the
complexities and multiple strategies involved in the current
struggle over access to absolute digital inscrutability, it's
hard to envision anything as simple as a fix emerging anytime
soon. Call strong cryptography a technical wager, then. It's a
smart bet that the state's long-running worst nightmare -- a
society whose entire informational texture is woven out of
unreadable secret codes -- turns out to be our own best dream of
the future.
 

Paul Ferguson               |  "Government, even in its best state,
Network Integrator          |   is but a necessary evil; in its worst
Centreville, Virginia USA   |   state, an intolerable one."
fergp@sytex.com             |      - Thomas Paine, Common Sense
 
         I love my country, but I fear its government.