Barlow Wired article on Clipper - "Jackboots on the Infobahn" !

[Stanton McCandlish <mech@eff.org>]

[note: this article and other Clipper material are archived at:
ftp://ftp.eff.org/pub/EFF/Policy/Clipper/
Similar material can be found at soda.berkeley.edu.]

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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 <infobot@wired.com> 
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@eff.org. 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@eff.org.

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@eff.org.

> Join Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility by e-mailing 
cpsr.info@cpsr

.org. CPSR is also organizing a protest, to which you can lend your support 
by sending e-mail to clipper.petition@cpsr.org with "I oppose Clipper" in 
the message body. Ftp/gopher/WAIS to cpsr.org /cpsr/privacy/

crypto/clipper for more info.


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@eff.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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