Schlafly on crypto

[Brad Dolan <bdolan@use.usit.net>]

Subject: Clinton Is Trying to be Big Brother -- Phyllis Schlafly Column 8/8/96


                    Clinton Is Trying to be Big Brother



     August 8, 1996                             by Phyllis Schlafly

     We hope the appropriate government agencies will soon solve the
     recent terrorist crimes and punish the criminals. But all
     Americans who care about civil liberties should vigorously resist
     President Clinton's attempt to use the terrorist attacks as an
     excuse to carry on his all-out war against the personal privacy of
     law-abiding Americans.

     This mind-set was first revealed in the Clinton health care bill,
     which would have given the government computer access to the
     medical records of all Americans. Fortunately, that totalitarian
     takeover of the health care industry was rejected.

     The Clinton Administration's education legislation now pending in
     Congress would put personal information about all schoolchildren
     -- academic, medical, attitudinal, behavioral, and family -- into
     an expanded Labor Market Information database available to the
     government, as well as to prospective employers.

     Now the Clinton Administration is trying to make it illegal for
     individual Americans to have private conversations with one
     another. That's the real meaning of its effort to control
     encryption technology, and it's a direct assault on the First
     Amendment.

     It would be downright ridiculous to assert that the First
     Amendment guarantees our right to speak in public but not in
     private. It would be just as ridiculous to say that we have
     freedom to speak in words that the government can understand, but
     not in words the government can't decipher.

     Americans have the right to speak to one another in private,
     behind closed doors, and we should likewise have the right to
     speak to one another in code and to put our coded messages on
     computer in a process called encryption. Americans would not
     tolerate the government opening and reading the letters we send
     through the mails, and we should not tolerate the government
     opening and reading our encrypted, or coded, messages sent via
     computer.

     Yet, Attorney General Janet Reno, FBI Director Louis Freeh, and
     Vice President Al Gore are all demanding the authority to read our
     encrypted messages. In a speech to the Commonwealth Club of
     California, Reno bluntly stated her demand for "ensuring law
     enforcement access to encrypted data.''

     Reno boasted that there is "a consensus'' that the government
     should create a system known as "Key Escrow'' (i.e., a supposedly
     "neutral third party''), to which all Americans should be forced
     to "entrust'' the keys to their encrypted messages, and to which
     the government would have access. On the contrary, there is no
     such consensus.

     Do you trust Janet Reno with access to your private messages? Do
     you trust the FBI to keep your files confidential?

     The Clinton Administration is already doing 30 to 40 percent more
     federal telephone wiretaps and other electronic surveillance than
     the last year of the Bush Administration. Those figures don't even
     include national security wiretaps or the hundreds of extensions
     granting more time for wiretap orders already issued.

     FBI Director Freeh wrote the New York Times last November that
     "There is no intention to expand the number of wiretaps or the
     extent of wiretapping." Four months later, FBI documents revealed
     that the FBI does, in fact, plan to increase electronic
     surveillance 54 percent by 1998 and 130 percent by 2004.

     On July 12, Al Gore announced that the Administration will
     continue to push for the adoption of a massive public key
     infrastructure to give the government access to all encrypted
     communications. In a blatant bid for a police-state surveillance
     society, Gore warned about "the dangers of unregulated encryption
     technology."

     A neutral panel of the National Research Council was set up to
     make policy recommendations about encryption. The panel called on
     the government to abandon its efforts to restrict encryption.

     The NSC panel concluded that increased use of encryption would
     enhance our national security, not diminish it. Thirteen out of
     its 16 members had security clearances with access to secret
     information, and they saw no national security reason to justify
     the Clinton policy.

     The Clinton Administration bases its campaign to control private
     encryption on the alleged need to fight crime through wiretapping.
     However, the NSC panel concluded that the ability of the private
     sector to transfer confidential financial and other data over the
     information highway without interception is far more important.

     New technologies have given government awesome power to spy on
     individuals. The Filegate investigation accidentally uncovered the
     shocking news that, as soon as Bill Clinton entered the White
     House in 1993, he secretly spent $400,000 on software to create a
     highly sophisticated computer database to track detailed
     political, financial, attitudinal, and personal biographical
     information on 200,000 people, including members of Congress and
     the media. Known as WHODB for White House Office Data Base, the
     system was nicknamed Big Brother.

     Encryption is a First Amendment issue, not a crime issue. If the
     Clinton Administration is allowed to control encryption, it would
     be the biggest expansion of federal power since the passage of the
     Income Tax Amendment in 1913.


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