Clipper takes another hit...

[Mike Ingle <MIKEINGLE@delphi.com>]

Looks like the Clipper fan club is growing by leaps and bounds...

PC/Computing, October 1993
Page 468 (opposite inside back cover).
Note: _abc_ indicates italics.

Illustration: several computers with keyholes in the screens.
Clinton's smiling face rises from the White House, as a long arm
reaches out with a key...

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                                Penn Jillette

Subterranean Clipper Chip Blues

"Phone's tapped anyway." So do it for Dylan and for Jefferson
(Airplane, Starship, and Thomas).

I'VE NEVER HAD a sip of alcohol, nor any recreational drugs (not
one puff to uninhale), but, being 38 years old, I feel I was part
of the hippie culture. I was young and rural in the sixties, but my
formative years were spent listening to music created by people who
chased the muse down many chemical alleys.
     Top 40 radio blared that the government wasn't to be trusted.
Dylan sang "Phone's tapped anyway," and his inflection said that
was a bad thing. But even as I was sucking up the culture, my
skeptical side said that all the "Tin soldiers and Nixon's
coming..." stuff might be a little dramatic. Romanticizing living
outside the law, coupled with the physiological effect of drugs,
might be making these artists a little paranoid, a little nutty.
     The joke was kinda on me. Paranoid or not, John Lennon _was_
on Nixon and FBI hate lists, the Vietnam War probably _was_ a very
bad idea, and the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up really
_did_ happen. No government is to be trusted. I could have gotten
a stronger lesson from the founding fathers, but they didn't have
any records out. "You say you want a revolution?"..."The government
that governs least governs best."
     Clinton is younger than any Rolling Stone (unless they replace
Bill Wyman with a new bass player from his ex-wife's generation).
It would seem that Bill _Jefferson_ Clinton would share the
mistrust of Big Brother that we tapped our collective foot to. But
remember, he's not Bob Dylan and Neil Young - he's Kenny G and
Fleetwood Mac. Watch him.
     Willy picked up Bush's evil encryption Clipper Chip fascist
football and ran with it ("Meet the new boss - same as the old
boss"). The Clipper Chip is supposed to give us more privacy, which
we need. An ex-friend of mine taped Madonna talking to her business
manager on her cordless phone, and some punk ("punk" in the prison
sense) broke into my Internet account and read my mail.
     The Clipper Chip, which was designed by government engineers,
would be used to scramble and decode information so that only the
addressee could read it. The government would sell this chip below
market value (some people believe they'd be getting something for
nothing; some people believe Elvis put syringes in Pepsi), and we'd
all have cheap privacy. Oh, by the way ("The large print giveth,
the small print taketh away"), the government would keep all the
keys so they could eavesdrop on might-be-bad-guys (with a subpoena,
of course).
     _What?!_
     The antl-Clipper Chip people sent me megs and megs of reasons
why the Clipper Chip sucks (the information on how it works is kept
secret, so private scientists wouldn't be able to check for
mistakes; trade with other countries would be difficult; how safe
could the codes be kept?; and so on). Big cheese computer people
yapped against it, and it got shot down the first time around on
the legislation front.
     On the tech front, there is a great cypherpunk ("punk" in the
rock and roll sense) alternative called Pretty Good Privacy, which
is nongovernment and free. One of my math-hip friends explained
public-key encryption to me, and it's pretty thinking; I'll try to
explain it in a future column. There was even talk of making
private encryption illegal (an evil idea, pure and simple).
     The more research I did, the simpler it got. You have
inalienable rights including life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. That's it. We have a right to communicate with anyone we
choose without anyone listening in. The government works for us.
Power to the people.

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Wow. One of the better anti-Clipper flames I've seen so far. Simple
and to the point. Repost this one everywhere.

Technical question: from what I've read, Clipper is only a single-
key system, basically an 80-bit super-DES. So when you hit the
SECURE button on your AT&T ClipperPhone, how do the phones exchange
session keys? DH exchange or something similar? Is this implemented
in the Clipper chip itself, or in external hardware? Is the format
standardized? If not, there will be plenty of interoperability
problems with the first generation of phones. For that matter, there
will probably be problems even if it is standardized.

Will it work over a standard phone line? If so, the phone must be
using data compression and a 14.4 modem or something. They'd have to
use forward error correction, too, because a 1-bit error would cause,
upon decryption, at least an 8-byte error burst. That's a very noticeable
click at 6-8KHz sampling rate. I haven't been able to get any details.
I called Mykotronx and they told me that the app notes weren't ready yet,
and offered to put me on a waiting list for them.