Big Brother vs. Cypherpunks

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

   Time, October 14, 1996, p. 78.


   The Netly News

   Joshua Quittner

   Big Brother vs. Cypherpunks


   For more than three years, the White House and the U.S.
   computer industry have sat locked, eyeball to eyeball, in
   a seemingly intractable face-off over who will control
   the secret codes that protect our most sensitive
   communications. The government claimed to be working to
   protect us from nuke-carrying terrorists; the computer
   industry said it was championing the individual's right
   to privacy. Neither was telling the whole truth.

   Last week, in a concession to Silicon Valley, the
   Administration blinked -- or perhaps it merely winked.
   Fittingly, in the arcane world of code making and
   breaking, it's difficult to ferret out who's doing what
   to whom. And why.

   A few things are incontrovertible. Vice President Al Gore
   announced the new encryption initiative at midweek, timed
   to coincide with support from an alliance of high-tech
   businesses that included such hardware heavyweights as
   IBM, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard. However, most
   of the big software makers --  and every civil liberties
   group -- still opposed it.

   At the core of the initiative is a new code-making scheme
   known as "key recovery." Here at last, the government and
   its supporters claimed, was a way to get around the more
   noxious aspects of the reviled Clipper chip, the
   Administration's first doomed attempt to balance the
   industry's call for stronger encryption with law
   enforcement's need to surveil our shadier citizens.
   Clipper, as proposed, would use a powerful encryption
   formula to encode communications sent over telephones and
   computer networks but would require that a "back door"
   key be built into each chip that would give police --
   where warranted, of course -- a means to eavesdrop.

   Nobody -- especially foreign companies -- liked the idea
   of the U.S. and its agents holding those keys. The new
   key-recovery proposal tries to get around that objection
   by chopping the keys into several pieces and storing them
   with "trusted agents" of the user's choosing. Some nice
   Swiss banks, perhaps.

   But the Administration's plan still falls short of what
   civil libertarians, and especially a vocal group of
   cryptoextremists who call themselves cypherpunks, say
   they need: encryption powerful enough to give back to the
   citizenry the right to absolute privacy, which we have
   lost in the information age. According to the
   cypherpunks, the so-called 56-bit code the Administration
   has okayed for export can be cracked by the National
   Security Agency's supercomputers in a matter of hours.

   Are they right? It's hard to know whom to believe in this
   cloak-and-dagger debate. Civil libertarians tend to gloss
   over the fact that the world is full of bad people with
   crimes to hide. The software industry -- which makes 48%
   of its profit overseas -- is clearly less concerned with
   privacy than with losing foreign sales. And it may be no
   accident that the Administration chose to start making
   concessions the same week an influential software CEO --
   Netscape's Jim Barksdale -- excoriated Clinton's
   cryptopolicy and endorsed Bob Dole.

   The issue is too complex -- and too important -- for
   political gamesmanship. It will never get sorted out
   until somebody starts playing it straight.

   -----

   Read the Netly News daily at netlynews.com on the World
   Wide Web

   [End]

   Thanks to JQ.