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Bacard & Barlow: Defend Privacy!
***************** Please Distribute Widely ****************
Colleagues and Friends,
Do you want the United States government to monitor your posts on
this Newsgroup and to read your "private" e-mail? Computer privacy
experts have issued an URGENT APPEAL for your help!!
Enclosed you will find 1) "Help CPSR Clip Clipper!" -- a brief
summary of the Clipper Chip assault against you written by Andre
Bacard and 2) "Jackboots on the Infobahn" -- an essay scheduled for
publication in WIRED magazine and written by John Perry Barlow --
which discusses the Clipper Chip in scary detail. Read what Vice
President Al Gore thinks about your privacy. Both articles give
PRACTICAL advise on how you can protect your privacy.
At this moment, the U.S. Government is working to force computer
manufacturers to install a so-called "Clipper Chip" into your
computers and telephones, at home and at work. This encryption chip
system would stop you and me from eavesdropping on each other.
However, it would give Big Brother power to eavesdrop on ALL
computer and telephone systems. Your tax dollars are paying for
this unprecedented attack against your privacy.
CPSR [Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility], in
particular, Dave Banisar, Marc Rotenberg and David Sobel in the
Washington. D.C. office, are leading the fight against the Clipper
Chip.
Banisar, Rotenberg, Sobel, and all Americans need your help.
It's expensive to navigate Washington's corridors of power, to
lobby, to file lawsuits, and to protect every American citizen's
right to privacy.
Should we let Clipper Chips squash our privacy to the size of a
silicon chip?
How much is your freedom & privacy worth to you? Please join me,
colleagues and friends. Pull out your checkbook and help CPSR.
Please send tax-deductible checks to:
CPSR
Box 717
Palo Alto, CA 94302-0717
(415) 322-3778 (voice) or <[email protected]>
See you in the future,
Andre
This letter was written and authorized solely by me, a private
citizen, concerned about preserving democracy.
------------------------------------------------------------
Andre Bacard | Bacard authored the book "Hunger for
Box 3009 | Power: Who Rules the World and How."
Stanford, CA 94309 | He writes a "Technology & Society"
[email protected] | column and has been interviewed on
| hundreds of radio talk shows.
Bacard supports the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Computer
Professionals for Social Responsibility. Info at <[email protected]>
and at <[email protected]>.
"He only earns his freedom and existence,
who daily conquers them anew."
[Goethe, FAUST (1832)]
------------------------------------------------------------
***** Now the Barlow article *******
=-=-Copyright 1993,4 Wired USA Ltd. All Rights Reserved=-=-=-=-=-=
For complete copyright information, please see the end of this file
-=-=
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 <[email protected]> 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 [email protected]. 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 [email protected].
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
[email protected].
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 [email protected] 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 ([email protected]) 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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