[5338] in Central_America
New quotes for Fri Mar 11
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Central America)
Fri Mar 11 05:19:18 1994
Date: Fri, 11 Mar 1994 05:18:26 -0500
From: Central America <root@charon.MIT.EDU>
To: ca-mtg@charon.MIT.EDU
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
admos (Alexander D Moskovitz):
Sorry I'm not currently logged on
I was last spotted on Thu Mar 10 20:22:47 1994
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
eytan (Eytan Adar):
Sorry I'm not currently logged on
I was last spotted on Fri Mar 11 01:39:25 EST 1994
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
hch (Hernando Cortina):
It is strange, isnt'it ?
that a man should have a consuming pashion
to do something for which he lacks the capacity.
T.S. ELIOT
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
kpchan (Kai P Chan):
{from system: This user's .plan file is not world-readable}
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
marthag (Martha H Greenberg):
home address:
32 Calvin St #1
Somerville, MA 02143
(617)666-9513
alternate home # (try the top one first):
(617)666-5482
work address:
Bolt Beranek and Newman
10 Moulton St.
Cambridge, MA 02140
617-873-4584
marthag@bbn.com
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
lady sings the blues
she's got 'em bad
she feels so sad
wants the world to know
just what her blues is all about
lady sings the blues
she tells her side
nothing to hide
now the world will know
just what her blues is all about
[....]
lady sings the blues
she's got 'em bad
she feels so sad
but now, the world knows
she's never gonna sing 'em no more
no more
-Lady Sings The Blues
Billie Holiday
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
rlcarr (Richard L. Carreiro):
[the article continues...]
The government's side
When asked to substantiate the need for Clipper, or the threat of
unbreakable encryption, the government often talks about crime prevention.
As a practical matter, however, wiretaps are almost always used *after*
crimes are committed--to gather evidence about the individuals the
government already suspects to have been involved in a crime. So, the
hypothetical cases involving nuclear terrorism or murder-kidnappings
aren't really convincing--it's the rare case in which a wiretap prevents a
crime from occurring. As a practical matter, the single most important
asset to law enforcement is not wiretaps but informants. And nothing about
unbreakable encryption poses the risk that informants are going to
disappear.
One of the more rational statements of the government's case for Clipper
comes from my friend Trotter Hardy, a law professor at William and Mary,
who writes:
"The government's argument, I take it, is that the benefit is law
enforcement. That strikes me as at least as great a benefit as minimum
wage laws; perhaps more, since it protects everybody (at least in theory),
whereas [minimum] wage laws primarily benefit their recipients. Maybe EPA
regs are the better analogy: everybody gets reduced pollution; with
Clipper, everybody gets reduced criminal activity. Is that not a
reasonable trade-off?"
But the problem is that the government refuses to be forthcoming as to
what kind of trade-off we're talking about. According to government
statistics, there are fewer than 1000 state and federal law-enforcement
wiretaps per year, and only of a minority of these wiretaps leads to
convictions. Yet we are being asked to abandon the chance for true privacy
and to risk billions of dollars in trade losses when there has never been
shown to be any crime associated with uncrackable encryption whatsoever.
And we're also being asked to believe that the kind of criminals who are
smart enough to use encryption are dumb enough to choose the one kind of
encryption that the government is guaranteed to be able to crack.
Moreover, there are fundamental political issues at stake. This country
was founded on a principle of restraints on government. A system in which
the privacy of our communications is contingent on the good faith of the
government, which holds all the encryption keys, flies in the face of what
we have been taught to believe about the structure of government and the
importance of individual liberty.
In short, the government fails to make its case in two separate
ways--pragmatically and philosophically.
Trotter goes on to write:
".... I don't think the government cares whether an accountant in India
can password protect a spreadsheet. I would guess that even Clipper or
DES [the government's current Digital Encryption Standard] or whatever
would be more than enough protection for such a person. I think the
government cares that it be able to detect foreign intelligence that is
relevant to US security or interests. I am not sure where I come out on
the question, but at the very least it seems to me that the government is
reasonable in this desire."
Yet there are some premises here that need to be questioned. Do we really
suppose that "foreign intelligence" is dependent on the American software
industry to develop its encryption tools? Diffie-Helman public-key
encryption and DES are already available worldwide, yet Microsoft can't
export software that contains either form of encryption.
No, the real issue is that, to the extent that a mass market arises for
encryption products, it makes the NSA's job more difficult, and it may at
some future time make some investigations more difficult as well.
When asked to quantify the problem, however, the government invariably
begs off. Instead, government spokespeople say, "Well, how would you feel
if there were a murder-kidnapping that we couldn't solve because of
encryption?" To which my answer is, "Well, I'd feel about the same way
that I'd feel if there were a murder-kidnapping that couldn't be solved
because of the privilege against self-incrimination."
Which is to say, I understand that limits on government power entail a
loss in efficiency of law-enforcement investigations and
intelligence-agency operations. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental
choice we have to make about what kind of society we want to live in.
Open societies, and societies that allow individual privacy, are *less
safe*. But we have been taught to value liberty more highly than safety,
and I think that's a lesson well-learned.
What's more, we need to be able to engage in rational risk assessment, and
that's something that the government resists. Instead, the government
subscribes to the reasoning of Pascal's Wager. Pascal, you may recall,
argued that the rational man is a Christian, even if the chances that
Christianity is true are small. His reasoning is quasi-mathematical--even
if the chances of Christianity's truth are small, the consequences of
choosing not to be a Christian are (if that choice is incorrect)
infinitely terrible. Eternal torment, demons, flames, the whole works.
This is precisely the way that the government talks about nuclear
terrorism and murder-kidnappings. When asked what the probability is of
a) a nuclear terrorist, who b) decides to use encryption, and c) manages
otherwise to thwart counterterrorist efforts, they'll answer "What does
it matter what the probability is? Even one case is too much to risk!"
But we can't live in a society that defines its approach to civil
liberties in terms of infinitely bad but low-probability events. Open
societies are risky. Individual freedom and privacy are risky. If we are
to make a mature commitment to an open society, we have to acknowledge
those risks up front, and reaffirm our willingness to endure them.
We face a choice now. After a century of technological development that
has eroded our ability to keep our personal lives private, we finally
possess, thanks to cheap computing power and advances in cryptography, the
ability to take privacy into our own hands and make our own decisions
about how much, and how well, to protect it.
This prospect is frightening to a government that has come to rely on its
ability to reach into our private lives when it sees the need to do so.
But I have faith that our society is not dependent on our government's
right to mandate disclosure of our personal records and private
communications--that a mature society can tolerate a large degree of
personal privacy and autonomy.
It's a faith I hope you share.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
therese (Therese):
Don't dream too wild, and shoot for the moon
Don't ride your heart like a balloon
Don't blow away to places unknown
Cause when you finally come knocking, there'll be nobody home
Nobody home
- Heart
--- End of Central America ---
