[5335] in Central_America
New quotes for Thu Mar 10
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Central America)
Thu Mar 10 05:26:06 1994
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 1994 05:25:27 -0500
From: Central America <root@charon.MIT.EDU>
To: ca-mtg@charon.MIT.EDU
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admos (Alexander D Moskovitz):
Sorry I'm not currently logged on
I was last spotted on Wed Mar 9 16:34:03 EST 1994
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alcorona (Alan Coronado):
{from system: This user's .plan file is not world-readable}
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alxengel (Morten A Engel):
{from system: This user's .plan file is not world-readable}
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eytan (Eytan Adar):
Sorry I'm not currently logged on
I was last spotted on Thu Mar 10 00:28:11 EST 1994
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kdmiller (Kenneth D Miller):
void main(){char b[17];int a=0,c=0,d; /* / for a good time, email: \ */
while(c!=-1){printf("%07x0:",a++);for /* ( kdmiller@athena.mit.edu ) */
(d=0;d<16;d++){c=getchar();b[d]=(c<' ' /* \ (Kenneth D. Miller III) / */
||c>'~')?'.':c;printf( "%s%02x",d&3?"":" ",c&255);}printf(" | %s\n",b);}}
Sorry, I'm not on right now. Try again later...
Last logout: Wed Mar 9 23:24:28 EST 1994
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rlcarr (Richard L. Carreiro):
A Chip Over My Shoulder:
The Problems With Clipper
Column for July 1994 issue of Internet World
By Mike Godwin
"Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy."
--Orson Welles
Your government is deeply troubled by the possibility that you can keep a
secret.
Or, to put it more precisely, the government is disturbed by the prospect
of widespread powerful encryption tools in individual hands. Once you can
keep your communications and data truly secret, officials worry, the value
of wiretapping, an important law-enforcement and intelligence tool, will
evaporate.
It's unclear whether the government's arguments are valid. But regardless
of whether they are, the government's latest efforts to prevent us from
adopting powerful and uncrackable encryption technologies raise serious
questions about personal liberty, the role of government, and the
possibility of privacy in the 21st century.
If you're not already familiar with these efforts, here's an update. The
Clinton Administration has embarked on an ambitious plan to prevent a mass
market for uncrackable encryption from arising. The first step in this
plan has already been announced: the Administration has called for the
entire federal government to adopt the Clipper Chip--an encryption
standard with a "back door"--for communications and data security. In
addition, the government has declared its intention to use every legal
method short of outright prohibition to discourage alternative forms of
encryption technology.
"Just what is this Clipper Chip?" you may be wondering. The short answer
is: the chip is an encryption device, developed to National Security
Agency specs, that keeps your communications and data secret from everyone
... except the government.
To understand how the chip works, you need to look at what officials call
its "key escrow encryption method." Manufactured by a private company
called Mykotronix, the chip uses an NSA-developed algorithm called
"Skipjack, " which, by all accounts so far, is a remarkably powerful
algorithm. But the chip also includes the "feature" that its primary
encryption key can be divided up mathematically into two "partial keys."
The government proposes that each partial key be held by a separate
government agency--the Administration has picked the Department of the
Treasury and the National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST)--from which the keys can be retrieved when government officials
obtain a wiretap order.
The NSA and the FBI love this idea. With the Clipper Chip in your phone or
computer, they believe, you have the power to keep your information
private from crooks and industrial spies and anyone else who wants to
pry--except of course for law enforcement and the NSA. Law enforcement and
intelligence agencies would be barred from seeking those escrowed keys in
the absence of legal authorization, normally a court order. "And of course
you needn't worry about us," say government officials. "We're here to
protect you."
Chips Off the New Block
The current initiative has been a long time coming. It was in April of
last year the Clinton Administration first announced Clipper--the
announcement was met with a public outcry from civil-liberties and
industry groups. Civil libertarians were concerned about the government's
insistence on its need to prevent citizens from having access to truly
unbreachable privacy technologies. Computer and telecom industry leaders
worried about a standard that might crush a potentially vital market in
such technologies.
At first the Administration expressed a willingness to listen. The Digital
Privacy and Security Working Group, a coalition of industry and
public-interest organizations headed by the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, outlined its objections and expressed the hope of engaging in
talks with the Administration about the issue. In early February of this
year, however, the Clinton Administration and various agencies announced
to the world that, in spite of the grave misgivings of civil-liberties and
industry groups, it would be proposing the Clipper Chip's encryption
scheme as a new Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS). The
standard, stresses the government, will be entirely "voluntary"--but the
government plans to use export-control laws and other methods to frustrate
the market for any competitive form of encryption technology.
Current export-control laws restrict the sales in foreign controls of
encryption hardware and software. The laws have not been entirely
effective in keeping commercial encryption technologies out of foreign
hands--it's possible these days to buy encryption products in Moscow, for
example. But the laws do succeed in deterring the American software
industry from developing powerful and easy-to-use encryption products,
since any company that does so is denied the right to sell the product on
the global market.
Still, if Clipper is voluntary, you may ask, what does it matter to
*individuals *what standard the government adopts? The government also
adopted the ADA programming language, after all, yet there are still
people programming in all sorts of languages, from BASIC to C++. The
answer is simple--"freedom of choice" is meaningful only if there are real
choices. The government's export-control strategy is designed to make sure
that there aren't any choices. If commercial software companies aren't
allowed to sell encryption to the world market, they're unlikely to
develop strong, easy-to-use alternatives to Clipper. And that means
individuals won't have access to alternatives.
Now, it's perfectly possible, in theory, to thwart the government-approved
Clipper scheme by using a non-commercial encryption application, such as
PGP, to pre-encrypt your messages before sending them through
Clipper-equipped devices. But PGP and other products, because of their
slowness or difficulty, are never likely to expand beyond the circle of
hobbyists that enthusiastically support them. For encryption products to
give rise to a genuine consumer market, they have to be quick and almost
transparently easy to use.
The government knows this, which is why their focus is on nipping
(clipping?) the commercial encryption software market in the bud. It's the
commercial market that really matters.
[to be continued...]
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rshah (Raj P Shah):
{from system: This user's .plan file is not world-readable}
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sorokin (Jessie Stickgold-Sarah):
She broke down and let me in
Made me see where I've been
Been down one time
Been down two times
I'm never going back again
You don't know what it means to win
Come down and see me again
Been down one time
Been down two times
I'm never going back again
Never Going Back Again
-- Fleetwood Mac
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therese (Therese):
Sooner or later just like the world first day
Sooner or later we learn to throw the past away
History will teach us nothing.
-- Sting
Nothing Like the Sun
--- End of Central America ---
