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NSA Chief Counsel in Wired, to appear on AOL
The guy in charge of marginalizing crypto users and privacy seekers for
the NSA, Stuart Baker, tries his hand at logical arguments with a minimum
of name-calling.
Do his arguments stand up? Not really. Note how he avoids the issue of
how easy it's getting for authorities to do 'drift-net' fishing -
trotting out the tired old 'no new capabilities' line. He also seems to
believe that requiring court authorization for wiretaps provides good
protection against their abuse (NSA has its own pet court).
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Copyright and distribution policy attached to the end of document. FYI.
X-within-URL: http://www.wired.com/Etext/2.06/Features/nsa.clipper.html
NSA'S CHIEF COUNSEL TO APPEAR ONLINE
Stewart A. Baker, Chief Counsel for the National Security Agency and
featured writer in WIRED 2.06 will host a Q&A session on the Clipper
Chip. He will appear on America Online in Center Stage (from AOL type
keyword: "center stage") on Thursday May 26, 1994, from 7-9 p.m. EST.
Baker is the NSA's top lawyer and supports the Clipper Initiative. He
worked briefly as Deputy General Counsel of the Education Department
under President Jimmy Carter. His article "Don't Worry Be Happy"
refutes seven myths of key escrow encryption and is a WIRED Exclusive.
_________________________________________________________________
DON'T WORRY BE HAPPY
Why Clipper Is Good For You
By Stewart A. Baker, Chief Counsel for the NSA
_________________________________________________________________
With all the enthusiasm of Baptist ministers turning their Sunday
pulpits over to the Devil, the editors of WIRED have offered me the
opportunity to respond to some of the urban folklore that has grown up
around key escrow encryption -- also known as the Clipper Chip.
Recently the Clinton administration has announced that federal
agencies will be able to buy a new kind of encryption hardware that is
sixteen million times stronger than the existing federal standard
known as DES. But this new potency comes with a caveat. If one of
these new encryption devices is used, for example, to encode a phone
conversation that is subject to a lawful government wiretap, the
government can get access to that device's encryption keys. Separate
parts of each key are held by two independent "escrow agents," who
will release keys only to authorized agencies under safeguards
approved by the attorney general. Private use of the new encryption
hardware is welcome but not required. That's a pretty modest proposal.
Its critics, though, have generated at least seven myths about key
escrow encryption that deserve answers.
MYTH NUMBER ONE: Key escrow encryption will create a brave new world
of government intrusion into the privacy of Americans.
Opponents of key escrow encryption usually begin by talking about
government invading the privacy of American citizens. None of us likes
the idea of the government intruding willy-nilly on communications
that are meant to be private.
But the key escrow proposal is not about increasing government's
authority to invade the privacy of its citizens. All that key escrow
does is preserve the government's current ability to conduct wiretaps
under existing authorities. Even if key escrow were the only form of
encryption available, the world would look only a little different
from the one we live in now.
In fact, it's the proponents of widespread unbreakable encryption who
want to create a brave new world, one in which all of us -- crooks
included -- have a guarantee that the government can't tap our phones.
Yet these proponents have done nothing to show us that the new world
they seek will really be a better one.
In fact, even a civil libertarian might prefer a world where wiretaps
are possible. If we want to catch and convict the leaders of criminal
organizations, there are usually only two good ways to do it. We can
"turn" a gang member -- get him to testify against his leaders. Or we
can wiretap the leaders as they plan the crime.
I once did a human rights report on the criminal justice system in El
Salvador. I didn't expect the Salvadorans to teach me much about human
rights. But I learned that, unlike the US, El Salvador greatly
restricts the testimony of "turned" co-conspirators. Why? Because the
co-conspirator is usually "turned" either by a threat of mistreatment
or by an offer to reduce his punishment. Either way, the process
raises moral questions -- and creates an incentive for false
accusations.
Wiretaps have no such potential for coercive use. The defendant is
convicted or freed on the basis of his own, unarguable words.
In addition, the world will be a safer place if criminals cannot take
advantage of a ubiquitous, standardized encryption infrastructure that
is immune from any conceivable law enforcement wiretap. Even if you're
worried about illegal government taps, key escrow reinforces the
existing requirement that every wiretap and every decryption must be
lawfully authorized. The key escrow system means that proof of
authority to tap must be certified and audited, so that illegal
wiretapping by a rogue prosecutor or police officer is, as a practical
matter, impossible.
MYTH NUMBER TWO: Unreadable encryption is the key to our future
liberty.
Of course there are people who aren't prepared to trust the escrow
agents, or the courts that issue warrants, or the officials who
oversee the system, or anybody else for that matter. Rather than rely
on laws to protect us, they say, let's make wiretapping impossible;
then we'll be safe no matter who gets elected.
This sort of reasoning is the long-delayed revenge of people who
couldn't go to Woodstock because they had too much trig homework. It
reflects a wide -- and kind of endearing -- streak of romantic
high-tech anarchism that crops up throughout the computer world.
The problem with all this romanticism is that its most likely
beneficiaries are predators. Take for example the campaign to
distribute PGP ("Pretty Good Privacy") encryption on the Internet.
Some argue that widespread availability of this encryption will help
Latvian freedom fighters today and American freedom fighters tomorrow.
Well, not quite. Rather, one of the earliest users of PGP was a
high-tech pedophile in Santa Clara, California. He used PGP to encrypt
files that, police suspect, include a diary of his contacts with
susceptible young boys using computer bulletin boards all over the
country. "What really bothers me," says Detective Brian Kennedy of the
Sacramento, California, Sheriff's Department, "is that there could be
kids out there who need help badly, but thanks to this encryption,
we'll never reach them."
If unescrowed encryption becomes ubiquitous, there will be many more
stories like this. We can't afford as a society to protect pedophiles
and criminals today just to keep alive the far-fetched notion that
some future tyrant will be brought down by guerrillas wearing
bandoleers and pocket protectors and sending PGP-encrypted messages to
each other across cyberspace.
MYTH NUMBER THREE: Encryption is the key to preserving privacy in a
digital world.
Even people who don't believe that they are likely to be part of
future resistance movements have nonetheless been persuaded that
encryption is the key to preserving privacy in a networked, wireless
world, and that we need strong encryption for this reason. This isn't
completely wrong, but it is not an argument against Clipper.
If you want to keep your neighbors from listening in on your cordless
phone, if you want to keep unscrupulous competitors from stealing your
secrets, even if you want to keep foreign governments from knowing
your business plans, key escrow encryption will provide all the
security you need, and more.
But I can't help pointing out that encryption has been vastly oversold
as a privacy protector. The biggest threats to our privacy in a
digital world come not from what we keep secret but from what we
reveal willingly. We lose privacy in a digital world because it
becomes cheap and easy to collate and transmit data, so that
information you willingly gave a bank to get a mortgage suddenly ends
up in the hands of a business rival or your ex-spouse's lawyer.
Restricting these invasions of privacy is a challenge, but it isn't a
job for encryption. Encryption can't protect you from the misuse of
data you surrendered willingly.
What about the rise of networks? Surely encryption can help prevent
password attacks like the recent Internet virus, or the interception
of credit card numbers as they're sent from one digital assistant to
another? Well, maybe. In fact, encryption is, at best, a small part of
network security.
The real key to network security is making sure that only the right
people get access to particular data. That's why a digital signature
is so much more important to future network security than encryption.
If everyone on a net has a unique identifier that others cannot forge,
there's no need to send credit card numbers -- and so nothing to
intercept. And if everyone has a digital signature, stealing passwords
off the Net is pointless. That's why the Clinton administration is
determined to put digital signature technology in the public domain.
It's part of a strategy to improve the security of the information
infrastructure in ways that don't endanger government's ability to
enforce the law.
MYTH NUMBER FOUR: Key escrow will never work. Crooks won't use it if
it's voluntary. There must be a secret plan to make key escrow
encryption mandatory.
This is probably the most common and frustrating of all the myths that
abound about key escrow. The administration has said time and again
that it will not force key escrow on manufacturers and companies in
the private sector. In a Catch-22 response, critics then insist that
if key escrow isn't mandated it won't work.
That misunderstands the nature of the problem we are trying to solve.
Encryption is available today. But it isn't easy for criminals to use;
especially in telecommunications. Why? Because as long as encryption
is not standardized and ubiquitous, using encryption means buying and
distributing expensive gear to all the key members of the conspiracy.
Up to now only a few criminals have had the resources, sophistication,
and discipline to use specialized encryption systems.
What worries law enforcement agencies --what should worry them -- is a
world where encryption is standardized and ubiquitous: a world where
anyone who buys an US$80 phone gets an "encrypt" button that
interoperates with everyone else's; a world where every fax machine
and every modem automatically encodes its transmissions without asking
whether that is necessary. In such a world, every criminal will gain a
guaranteed refuge from the police without lifting a finger.
The purpose of the key escrow initiative is to provide an alternative
form of encryption that can meet legitimate security concerns without
building a web of standardized encryption that shuts law enforcement
agencies out. If banks and corporations and government agencies buy
key escrow encryption, criminals won't get a free ride. They'll have
to build their own systems -- as they do now. And their devices won't
interact with the devices that much of the rest of society uses. As
one of my friends in the FBI puts it, "Nobody will build secure phones
just to sell to the Gambino family."
In short, as long as legitimate businesses use key escrow, we can
stave off a future in which acts of terror and organized crime are
planned with impunity on the public telecommunications system. Of
course, whenever we say that, the critics of key escrow trot out their
fifth myth:
MYTH NUMBER FIVE: The government is interfering with the free market
by forcing key escrow on the private sector. Industry should be left
alone to develop and sell whatever form of encryption succeeds in the
market.
In fact, opponents of key escrow fear that businesses may actually
prefer key escrow encryption. Why? Because the brave new world that
unreadable encryption buffs want to create isn't just a world with
communications immunity for crooks. It's a world of uncharted
liability. What if a company supplies unreadable encryption to all its
employees, and a couple of them use it to steal from customers or to
encrypt customer data and hold it hostage? As a lawyer, I can say it's
almost certain that the customers will sue the company that supplied
the encryption to its employees. And that company in turn will sue the
software and hardware firms that built a "security" system without
safeguards against such an obvious abuse. The only encryption system
that doesn't conjure up images of a lawyers' feeding frenzy is key
escrow.
But there's a second and even more compelling reason why the key
escrow initiative can't fairly be characterized as interfering with
private enterprise: The encryption market has been more or less
created and sustained by government. Much of the market for encryption
devices is in the public sector, and much of the encryption technology
now in widespread use in the private sector was funded, perfected, or
endorsed by the federal government.
And not by accident, either. Good encryption is expensive. It isn't
just a matter of coming up with a strong algorithm, although testing
the strength of an algorithm can be enormously time-consuming. The
entire system must be checked for bugs and weaknesses, a laborious and
unglamorous process. Generally, only the federal government has been
willing to pay what it costs to develop secure communications gear.
That's because we can't afford to have our adversaries reading our
military and diplomatic communications.
That's led to a common pattern. First, the government develops, tests,
or perfects encryption systems for itself. Then the private sector
drafts along behind the government, adopting government standards on
the assumption that if it's good enough for the government's
information, it's good enough to protect industry's.
As encryption technology gets cheaper and more common, though, we face
the real prospect that the federal government's own research, its own
standards, its own purchases will help create the future I described
earlier -- one in which criminals use ubiquitous encryption to hide
their activities. How can anyone expect the standard-setting arms of
government to use their power to destroy the capabilities of law
enforcement -- especially at a time when the threat of crime and
terror seems to be rising dramatically?
By adopting key escrow encryption instead, the federal government has
simply made the reasonable judgment that its own purchases will
reflect all of society's values, not just the single-minded pursuit of
total privacy.
So where does this leave industry, especially those companies that
don't like either the 1970s-vintage DES or key escrow? It leaves them
where they ought to be -- standing on their own two feet. Companies
that want to develop and sell new forms of unescrowed encryption won't
be able to sell products that bear the federal seal of approval. They
won't be able to ride piggyback on federal research efforts. And they
won't be able to sell a single unreadable encryption product to both
private and government customers.
Well, so what? If companies want to develop and sell competing,
unescrowed systems to other Americans, if they insist on hastening a
brave new world of criminal immunity, they can still do so -- as long
as they're willing to use their own money. That's what the free market
is all about.
Of course, a free market in the US doesn't mean freedom to export
encryption that may damage US national security. As our experience in
World War II shows, encryption is the kind of technology that wins and
loses wars. With that in mind, we must be careful about exports of
encryption. This isn't the place for a detailed discussion of
controls, but one thing should be clear: They don't limit the
encryption that Americans can buy or use. The government allows
Americans to take even the most sophisticated encryption abroad for
their own protection. Nor do controls require that software or
hardware companies "dumb down" their US products. Software firms have
complained that it's inconvenient to develop a second encryption
scheme for export, but they already have to make changes from one
country to the next -- in language, alphabet, date systems, and
handwriting recognition, to take just a few examples. And they'd still
have to develop multiple encryption programs even if the US abolished
export controls, because a wide variety of national restrictions on
encryption are already in place in countries from Europe to Asia.
MYTH NUMBER SIX: The National Security Agency is a spy agency; it has
no business worrying about domestic encryption policy.
Since the National Security Agency has an intelligence mission, its
role in helping to develop key escrow encryption is usually treated as
evidence that key escrow must be bad security. In reality, though, NSA
has two missions. It does indeed gather intelligence, in part by
breaking codes. But it has a second, and oddly complementary, mission.
It develops the best possible encryption for the US government's
classified information.
With code breakers and code makers all in the same agency, NSA has
more expertise in cryptography than any other entity in the country,
public or private. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that NSA
had the know- how to develop an encryption technique that provides
users great security without compromising law enforcement access. To
say that NSA shouldn't be involved in this issue is to say the
government should try to solve this difficult technical and social
problem with both hands tied behind its back.
MYTH NUMBER SEVEN: This entire initiative was studied in secret and
implemented without any opportunity for industry or the public to be
heard.
This is an old objection, and one that had some force in April of
1993, when the introduction of a new AT&T telephone encryption device
required that the government move more quickly than it otherwise would
have. Key escrow was a new idea at that time, and it was reasonable
for the public to want more details and a chance to be heard before
policies were set in concrete. But since April 1993, the public and
industry have had many opportunities to express their views. The
government's computer security and privacy advisory board held several
days of public hearings. The National Security Council met repeatedly
with industry groups. The Justice Department held briefings for
congressional staff on its plans for escrow procedures well in advance
of its final decision. And the Commerce Department took public comment
on the proposed key escrow standard for 60 days.
After all this consultation, the government went forward with key
escrow, not because the key escrow proposal received a universally
warm reception, but because none of the proposal's critics was able to
suggest a better way to accommodate society's interests in both
privacy and law enforcement. Unless somebody comes up with one, key
escrow is likely to be around for quite a while. That's because the
only alternative being proposed today is for the government to design
or endorse encryption systems that will cripple law enforcement when
the technology migrates -- as it surely will -- to the private sector.
And that alternative is simply irresponsible.
For more information on the Clipper standard you can access WIRED's
Clipper archive via the following WIRED Online services.
* WIRED Infodroid e-mail server: Send e-mail to [email protected]
containing the words "send clipper/index" on a single line inside
the message body.
* WIRED Gopher: Gopher to gopher.wired.com and select "Clipper
Archive."
* WIRED on World Wide Web: http://www.wired.com select "Clipper
Archive."
* WIRED on America Online: The keyword is WIRED.
* WIRED on the Well: Type "go wired" from any "OK" prompt.
_________________________________________________________________
Stewart A. Baker is the National Security Agency's top lawyer. He
worked briefly as Deputy General Counsel of the Education Department
under President Jimmy Carter, and he practiced international law at
Steptoe & Johnson, in Washington, DC. He has been at the NSA since
1992.
_________________________________________________________________
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