Encryption and the NII (fwd)

[Anonymous <nowhere@bsu-cs.bsu.edu>]

Newsgroups: talk.politics.crypto,comp.org.eff.talk
From: kadie@cs.uiuc.edu (Carl M Kadie)
Subject: [NWU] "Encryption and the NII"
Organization: University of Illinois, Dept. of Comp. Sci., Urbana, IL
Date: Mon, 29 Nov 1993 18:38:50 GMT

[This is an excerpt from the Newsletter of The Political Issues
Committee of the National Writers Union (UAW Local 1981) Address
Correspondence to: Bob Chatelle, 296 Western Avenue, Cambridge MA
02139 (617/497-7193). The full newsletter was posted to
alt.censorship.

(c) 1993 National Writers Union. Posted with permission from the
November 1993 issue of the PIC Newsletter, the journal of the
Political Issues Committee.  All rights reserved to the authors.
Reproduction without permission is expressly prohibited, but requests
to repost articles on electronic systems serving writers are
encouraged.  Send permission requests to Bob Chatelle,
kip@world.std.com -cmk]

       Encryption and the NII, by Jenevra Georgini

As stated in President Clinton's message of November 5, gov-
ernment policy regarding the national information infras-
tructure (NII) shares two significant objectives with the
Writers Union goals.  The Clinton administration seeks to
ensure broad access by adapting the concept of fair use to
the NII, while simultaneously strengthening domestic copy-
right laws and international treaties to protect the
integrity of intellectual property.  Because the network
will span the globe, standards must be coherent and uni-
formly applied in a way that permits industry growth.  A
standard-based regulatory approach posits legal solutions.
Yet standards remain toothless unless implemented by tech-
nology promoting the dual goal of access and integrity.
Encryption technology is one suggested means of embedding
electronic signatures to authenticate digital works.
Encryption was originally developed by the government for
wartime uses.  Now the technology has become available to
private citizens through programs such as RIPEM (public
domain software based on a program developed with federal
funding at MIT) and Philip Zimmermann's PGP (Pretty Good
Privacy, whose underlying algorithm is pirated from the
patented MIT program).  Zimmermann describes his product as
"the *de facto* worldwide standard for encryption and
email."  It can be used to keep message transmissions (such
as downloading works from a net) private while simulta-
neously authenticating the work.  Each use has a public key
and a private key.  Correspondents use the public key to
encrypt a message to that key's owner.  The key owner gives
out or publishes the key as one would give out an address.
Although the public key can unlock the code that the private
key makes and vice versa, knowing the public key doesn't
enable anyone to deduce the private key.  Those who know the
public key can only encrypt messages for sending; they can-
not decrypt the recipient's messages.  The recipient uses
her own private key to decrypt messages sent.  At the same
time, an author making works available online could encrypt
that work with her own private key.  This would provide a
digital "signature" (or perhaps "fingerprint" would be a
better term; signatures can be forged but private keys are
given to only one person).  Anyone wishing to access the
work could use the sender's public key to verify the origin.
The public key could be included on the work's title screen
to facilitate access.  The user could decrypt the private
code by means of the public code enough to ascertain that
the work had been tampered with but not enough to reveal the
private code (analogous to being able to fit a key into a
lock without the door opening.)

The development of micro-sized encryption chips has made
this technology accessible to a broad range of consumers--
including drug dealers, tax evades, and traders in national
secrets.  Of course, the larger and more powerful government
machines can crack any private citizens 140-digit code in a
day.  However, this represents a substantial outlay of gov-
ernment time and resources for very little reward.  As the
number of messages posted on the net increases, forced
decrypting offers ever-diminishing returns.  (Note!  This is
know as the "logic of the net," a digital variation on "the
more the merrier."  It is also referred to by some commenta-
tors as "the fax effect:" owning the only fax in the world
won't do your business much good, but your fax's value
increases every time someone else buys one because you can
now exchange more information.)  Instead of trying to con-
tain the encryption explosion, the government should harness
its energy to protect citizens' privacy and encourage dis-
tribution of works on the net.  Building on encryption to
prevent piracy on the net is the logical next step in beat-
ing defense budget swords into information plowshares.  Leg-
islation should be enacted limiting state and federal
decrypting requirements to the reasonable search and
seizures contemplated by the Fourth Amendment.  No one
should be forced to decrypt their data without due process
of law, including probable cause shown in the form of a
court-ordered search warrant.  The practice of seizing not
only hackers' computers but all electronic equipment in
their possession is a blatant violation of civil rights.
Perhaps, as suggested by leading scholar Laurence tribe, a
new amendment to the Constitution should be enacted to safe-
guard our traditional-rights in the new frontier environ-
ment.

Encryption technology has been responsible for startling
(some might say threatening) advances in digital tape infor-
mation retrieval.  Digital Audio Tape (DAT) records music in
sixteen binary digits.  The human ear does not register
sounds down to the sixteenth bit.  Thus, encrypted informa-
tion such as books or programs can be recorded on each six-
teenth bit.  One could play the tape and hear only music
without interference from the other recorded information
because it takes us such a small space.  The encrypted data
would also be invisible to one examining it on a computer
screen.  The only way to tell that there is anything other
than music on the tape is to compare it bit to bit on a com-
puter with a virgin cassette.  Even with the computer's
help, the encrypted data could look exactly like the noise
that typically appears during recording.  In the words of
Tim May, retired Intel physicist, "Anyone carrying a single
music cassette bought in a store could carry the entire com-
puterized files of the Stealth bomber, and it would be com-
pletely and totally imperceptible."  May further related
that information can also be encoded in images: he could
download a photo, insert an encrypted message in the least
significant portion of each pixel (to minimize distortion)
and repost the image without any recognizable difference.

In addition to its possibilities for authenticating works
online, encryption responds to the problem of royalty track-
ing traditionally solved by licensing.  A microchip invented
by entrepreneur Peter Sprague is programmed to decrypt only
as much of its encrypted database as the user pays for.
After browsing a topic menu, the reader selects what infor-
mation she wants.  The program decrypts that information and
counts how many times it has decrypted (or how many bytes in
a per-byte fee structure).  The user is billed accordingly,
to a debit card or even to an electronic account where e-
money takes the place of cash.  Although encryption, like
any other software, is not completely hackproof, methods can
be developed to make piracy much more trouble than it is
worth.

                              --Jenevra Georgini, NWU Intern


-- 
Carl Kadie -- I do not represent any organization; this is just me.
 = kadie@cs.uiuc.edu =