[748] in Cypherpunks
"Newsweek" Article on Clipper and Encryption
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Eric Hughes)
Wed Jun 2 02:19:48 1993
Date: Tue, 1 Jun 93 22:08:58 -0700
From: Eric Hughes <hughes@soda.berkeley.edu>
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: Timothy C. May's message of Tue, 1 Jun 93 18:56:10 -0700 <9306020156.AA27555@netcom.netcom.com>
I got a call one week ago today (Tuesday May 25th) from Josh Ramo at
the science desk at Newsweek. I spoke to him for about an hour on the
technicalities and politics of encryption. He was to my pleasant
surprise quite able to follow a telephone description of how
Diffie-Hellman key exchange works (!) and was quite conducive to my
explanation of some of the less public aspects of the clipper project.
I think we got extremely good coverage in this article. Here are some
of the aspects involved.
-- Josh mentioned that he had Dorothy Denning on his list of people to
call. She did not get quoted; I did. There's significance to that.
-- The pro-crypto quote came first. Kammer's quote, on technical
matters, not political ones, came in the middle. The scary ominous
'mandatory standard' quote, from NIST, came last.
-- They did not replay the White House line that skipjack is so much
harder to crack than DES. I convinced Josh that by iterating DES, the
pracatical security of the underlying ciphers was the same, i.e.
impenetrable. Thus, no propagation of half-truths.
-- The sub-headline is against false cryptography.
-- The phrase "civil libertarians and corporations" was used, implying
a united front across liberal/conservative lines against this
proposal. This phrase was extremely clever on their behalf to avoid
specifically mentioning partisan politics.
-- The NSA is protrayed as demanding and coercive. First they'll deny
government contracts and export licenses, and if that doesn't work,
they'll outlaw it.
-- Cellular phone are touted as insecure, implying that something
ought to be done about that.
-- The sidebar has an example of cryptography four millenia old;
that's respectable.
-- The article does not play up the escrow aspects of the wiretap
chip. Their simplification, that the government has your key, attains
the root issue without confusion.
-- They mention that the keys wil have to be stored on computers, and
are thus vulnerable. This a point I made specifically to Josh, and
they took my example of foreign intelligence and *expanded* on it.
--They mention that NIST worked on the algorithm with the NSA.
All in all, I don't think we could have hoped for better. There's
just about nothing flattering said about the wiretap chip, and plenty
of things against it. The article is about as anti-Clipper as you
might expect given that Newsweek does not want to appear too partisan
one way or another.
Eric
