Maneuvering the Instruments of Control Through Deception

["Michael Pierson" <wfgodot@iquest.com>]

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Watching the rapid fire succession of Administration rulings 
and gambits, and the developments of various contending legislative
proposals and industry initiatives, along with all the debate over the
differing implications and portents of this distracting plethora of
moves and countermoves, has made for quite an intriguing spectacle. 
In particular, the recent controversies over threatening elements in
the SAFE bill and the motives of the legislators involved, as well as
the contentions concerning Netscape's aims or quality of judgment in
its latest key recovery announcements reminded me of some lines from
R.G.H. Siu's _The Craft of Power_:

  ...There is an increasing need as time goes on for a voluntary
  surrender of freedom on the part of the people at large or at least
  for a relative passivity toward encroachments on it.  An essential
  instrument for bringing this predisposition into being is
  propaganda.  The purpose of your propaganda, then, should not be
  sympathetic education but subtle manipulation. [...] Orthodoxy
  should not comprise your primary objective in propaganda, but what
  Jaques Ellul has called orthopraxy.  This is "an action that in
  itself, and not because of the value judgments of the person who is
  acting, leads directly to a goal, which for the individual is not a
  conscious and intentional objective to be attained, but which is
  considered such by the propagandist."  Knowing the real action to be
  taken in furtherance of the objective behind the informational
  barrage, the propagandist "maneuvers the instrument that will secure
  this action."

I thought Lucky Green keenly observed what might be considered 
an example of this process in action when a while back on the 
Cryptography list he wrote:

> This simply attests to the thoroughness with which the GAK forces
> have managed to frame the debate. There is zero need for key recover
> if the goal is to locally obtain plaintext. However, the vast
> majority of large businesses out there have been convinced that they
> need key recovery to achieve this goal.

> Therefore they are now demanding to be given a specific method for
> achieving this goal, the method most beneficial to outside forces.

> A truly brilliant deception.

It is certainly a sly move, but like other sleights of hand, it 
benefits when a certain naivete is present in its targets.  For 
businesses, there is an additional economic calculus involved that can
sometimes make the deceptions harder to discern, or easier to swallow,
or both to varying degrees.   But for the adamant opponents of GAK,
these subterfuges should not seem so obscure.  It's clear by now that
the core pro-GAK forces have a good appreciation of Sun Tzu's dictum
that "All warfare is based on deception."

There are some other passages from Sun Tzu that seem somewhat 
topical to recent events.

  In all fighting, the direct method may be used for joining battle, 
  but indirect methods will be needed in  order to secure victory.

  Indirect tactics, efficiently applied, are inexhaustible as Heaven
  and Earth, unending as the flow of rivers and streams; like the sun
  and the moon, they end but to begin anew; like the four season's,
  they pass away to return once more.

  ...Thus one who is skillful at keeping the enemy on the move 
  maintains deceitful appearances, according to which the enemy will
  act.  He sacrifices something, that the enemy may snatch at it.

  By holding out baits, he keeps him on the march; then with a body of
  picked men he lies in wait for him.

Of course, the nature of the battlefield and the makeup of the forces
contending are more complicated, subtle, and considerably more
abstracted than the matters that Sun Tzu was concerned with. 
Nevertheless, certain themes remain timeless in warfare both military
and psycho-political.  Documents that EPIC and others have managed to
acquire through FOIA requests show that duplicity has been part of the
game plan on this issue since prior to the Klinton Administration. 
The hardcore surveillance state forces have long subscribed to the
principle that "In war, practice dissimulation, and you will succeed."
 My impression is that they have adhered pretty consistently to that
principle so far.

It seems that some of the internecine controversy of late amongst the
various factions in general opposition to GAK and other forms of
privacy escrow and intrusion, to varying degrees, comes from
disagreements regarding the relative merit or malignancy of differing
political approaches and the motivations of the political actors
involved.  In part, this can depend upon where on the
Anarchist-Minarchist-Benevolent_social_welfare_state spectrum they
come from, and the intensity of their mistrust, or outright hostility,
toward the process and role of government, but numerous other factors
are involved.  Many of these disagreements are valid and will continue
(hopefully, though, not to the point of serving the purposes of the
main adversary).  One could argue that some who might really believe
they are trying to preserve privacy will end up undermining it
instead.  The road to hell can indeed be paved with good intensions,
as well as bad, naive, opportunistic, calculating, or craven...  But
in a broader strategic sense, those paving the road to hell, or what
they are paving it with, can be less important than understanding the
mentality of those who sway its course there, and the means they use
to achieve their ends.  Chief among these means is their use of
deceit.  

Deception and sophistry are time honored tactics of those who want to
build a more intrusive authoritarian state.  The people who have
promoted the kind of "2 + 2 = 5" reasoning that's been used to
rationalize things like "good faith" exceptions to the Fourth
Amendment, or the contemptible mockery of due process represented by
government's abuse of civil forfeiture, are of essentially the same
ilk as those who now expect citizens to accept assurances about
"lawful authorization" and due process when it comes to their
promotion of CALEA and GAK.

The fearmongering exaggerations and misrepresentations that are 
spread by GAK proponents are part of a larger pattern as well.  David
Burnam's excellent 1996 book on the Justice Department _Above The Law_
does a good job of documenting some of this with respect to the
flagrantly misleading representations of national crime statistics by
the FBI and others early in the Clinton administration and before, and
provides some useful perspective on their more recent claims
concerning the need for new electronic surveillance infrastructures
and encryption controls. 

It isn't simply the talent for facile deceit that characterizes 
the effective surveillance state advocate, but also the ability to
maintain a pious pretense (and rarely perhaps even the self-delusion)
of support for privacy and civil liberties while pushing the policies
that undermine these very things.  Senator Kerry's remarks on his
Orwellianly titled "The Secure Public Networks Act" come to mind.

A particularly telling and ironic example of this appears in a 
transcript from the FBI website of a speech given by Director Freeh in
Krakow Poland during June 1994:

  "The Nazi terror began not by breaking the law but by using 
   the law. The morning after the Reichstag fire in February, 
   1933, President Von Hindenburg was persuaded by Hitler to 
   invoke Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. This emergency 
   provision of the national law was the key to its 
   elimination. It enabled Hitler to suspend individual and 
   civil liberties, freedom of speech, press and assembly; it 
   allowed warrantless searches of homes and the seizure of 
   property without due process of law.

  [...] SS and SA members then started a wave of political violence
  which culminated in a March, 1933, Enabling Act granting dictatorial
   powers to Hitler.

  Hitler's brutal usurpation and exercise of power was in part 
  carried out by clever use of the police and  the corruptly 
  controlled enactment of new laws."

One wonders how Mr. Freeh went about reconciling this knowledge of
history with his role as point man for the Clinton Administration's
attempts to stampede legislation for  new "anti-terrorism" powers
following Oklahoma and last summers TWA explosion/Olympic bombing
episodes.

As Freeh's remarks reveal, the role terrorism has played in 
promoting the agendas of authoritarian statists has been quite 
notable.  Terrorism's major consequences in history appear 
largely to have been to serve the expansion of the domestic powers of
the states targeted, not the furtherance of the agendas of the
terrorists responsible (or allegedly responsible).  In fact, some
states have found terrorism so valuable in this regard that when
terrorists did not exist, it was necessary to invent them (or
facilitate them, or exaggerate their threat).  

The state's concerted cultivation and fanning of fear and hysteria in
relation to acts of terrorism (with the aid of the major mass media)
is a increasingly refined art form.  It's role has become so
significant that it deserves a name.  I call it State Sponsored
Hysterrorism.  While acts or threats of terrorism are the the most
valuable adjunct to the exploitation of hysterrorism; fear mongering
concerning other major bogeymen, most notably the specter of drugs,
pornography and pedophilia, can occasionally be used to achieve the
requisite level of alarmed herd psychology, and the extra
marginalization of reasoned deliberation necessary to serve the ends
of the hysterrorists.

I think the U.S. Government's campaign of hysterrorism following the
TWA explosion/Olympic-Park bombing is a case study for what we can
expect in the future.  The political exploitation of this event was a
contingency plan in waiting for the right bomb to go off somewhere. 
Next time, they will be even more prepared.

There might be a few in the anti-GAK camp who are still inclined to
entertain the notion that the Clinton administration's actions with
regard to GAK and CALEA have been largely due to them being misguided,
or benighted, or gullibly enthralled with apocalyptic scenarios drawn
by secret intelligence reports, and crime threats painted by
latter-day Hoovers.  Perhaps they believe that if the Clintonites
could only be made to understand the futility of attaining their
"professed" objectives, they would be reasonable. But the fact (from
my vantage) is that following the Oklahoma bombing, and even more
egregiously, following the the TWA/Olympic events last summer, this
administration dishonestly promoted and endeavored to exploit public
fear and the political intimidation that could be derived from that
fear in a cynical attempt to stampede the ill-considered passage of
legislation granting sweeping new surveillance powers to the
government.  These attempts to subvert and hot-wire the legislative
process in this regard, as well as the disingenuous shell games they
have played with their succession of Clipper and key escrow/recovery
proposals and initiatives, have cast serious doubt in my mind on the
quality of their principles, misguided or otherwise.  

I view the government's exploitation of occurances of terrorism and
hysterrorism to be the most potent potential threat to privacy and
civil liberties we face.  The stage is now being set by an increasing
drumbeat of warnings, news specials, and so forth about the threat of
more exotic forms of Nuclear, Chemical or Biological attack.  I recall
a melodramatic news piece a while back where a reporter sensationally
demonstrated how easy it was to get a shoebox-sized container filled
with test-tubes on a subway train, and a host of "experts" were
interviewed about the potential pandora's box of nasty possibilities
awaiting us in the years to come.  A few weeks ago, a forum on
terrorism in Atlanta, organized by Former Senator Nunn and attended by
Defense Secretary Cohen and others, brought lurid speculation on
things like the future development of custom engineered viral
pathogens, and warnings about "the Internet transmitting knowledge to
people all over the globe in how to make weapons of mass destruction."
 

One gets the impression like they can't wait until their menacing
forecasts are validated.  The message is that uncontrolled Information
is Threat, and that we're going to need protection from many new forms
of Data Crime in our Fearful New World.  Sadly, considering the public
at-large's current suseptibility to the politics of fear, it probably
wouldn't take much to sell this message.  Major acts of terrorism
aren't the worry of those who most want the institution of intrusive
state powers, it's their secret wish.

The Friend's of Big Brother are holding some strong cards, but many of
them rely on appeals to fear and ignorance.  Their ability to deceive,
mislead, distract, ensnare, market fictions, manage perceptions, and
structure the terms of debates to their advantage can be quite
formidable at times.  It was fortunate that they miscalculated early
on concerning the political repercussions from the persecution of Phil
Zimmermann and the ham-handed Clipper_I proposal.  While they continue
to make tactical errors which can be exploited, they are refining
their approach as time goes on, and their more successful tactics can
be considerably less obvious than their blunders.  Perhaps having
discovered the drawbacks of frontal assaults, one of their new guiding
principles might be "when using our forces, we must seem inactive;
when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away". 

Insidious machinations (stego-politics?) are more challenging to
counter, but like other forms of legerdemain, knowing what to look for
makes the artifice easier to discern and derail, however deftly done. 
- From the surveillance statist's perspective on the public, it is
indeed true that "Ignorance is Strength".  While the "Knowledge is
Power" forces may be outgunned in certain respects, they do have the
advantage of not being hampered by the need to conceal duplicity.

The ultimate solutions to preserving privacy may turn out to be 
technical, but whether one is an avowed cryptoanarchist, or a 
libertarian (!'L') type with mixed minarchist inclinations 
(sort of like me), or whatever, in the near term, developments in the
political arena are far from irrelevant.  The state's most serious
opponents to privacy well understand the value of swaying public
perceptions and attitudes.  Their best hope is to find a way to shape
public and congressional opinion in a way that will allow them to get
restrictions on unconditionally secure encryption passed into law, the
sooner the better.  The longer they can be delayed and stymied, the
less likely they are to succeed.  In any case, we should be careful
not to play into their hands, or provide them with material to
facilitate their efforts to foster fears.  In the words of Sun Tzu,
"the highest form of generalship is to balk the enemy's plans" -- not
to serve them.

In the struggle to defend our privacy, personal sovereignty, and
liberty in general, there will be disagreements over where the enemy
lies, and how to best take aim against it.  Whatever the
disagreements, I hope we can at least manage to avoid standing in a
circle as we fire.


 -Michael

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