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T A B L E__T A L K

Emoticons: Whether you love them :-) or hate them >:-( join the debate in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Living by The Book
By Julie Caniglia
Inside the cult of the Franklin Planner
(03/11/98)

PalmPilot reading
By Robert Rossney
Is that little black box just "fashion technology" -- or the future face of computing?
(03/10/98)

Piracy on the Web seas
By Andrew Leonard
Will Slate be able to fend off the Web's password pirates?
(03/09/98)

21st Challenge
Results from Challenge No. 6: Find-and-replace blunders
(03/06/98)

Let's Get This Straight
By Scott Rosenberg
All Gates, all the time -- there's no escaping Bill
(03/05/98)

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BROWSE THE
21ST ARCHIVES

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fending off Big Brother____

[ 2 1 S T   B O O K S ]

BY ANDREW LEONARD | Why should we care about public access to cryptography? Well, take a moment and consider just who it is, in the United States at least, who doesn't want us to have it. For starters, we've got two Big Brother wannabes, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. For half a decade, they've been whining to anyone who will listen that their ability to protect national security, crack down on terrorists and battle organized crime will be crippled if ordinary citizens are given the right to protect their privacy with state-of-the-art cryptographic tools.

Fie on them. As Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau compellingly demonstrate in "Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption," advances in communications technology have granted government snoops and spooks unprecedented access to the intimate details of our daily lives. And with that access has come an unending stream of state-sponsored abuses of power. It seems that avoiding the temptation to spy on private citizens in the service of partisan political goals is just too darn hard.

Diffie and Landau suggest that it's time to roll back the clock -- to use encryption technology to rebuild privacy bulwarks weakened by a sustained, century-long attack. We now live in a world where video cameras are omnipresent and credit card trails are unavoidable. Even worse, the Internet's emergence as an indispensable means for communication ensures that our every electronic utterance becomes daily more accessible to busybodies armed with supercomputers and suspicious minds. Cryptography is just one tool, argue Diffie and Landau, for redressing an increasingly obvious and unhealthy imbalance.

Through detailed review of the available records, Diffie and Landau poke holes in the argument that the government needs the power of the wiretap and electronic surveillance to combat organized crime and terrorism. It's rare indeed for a wiretap to be the linchpin for an entire case. And there's no evidence whatsoever that encrypted communications have posed any kind of a problem for law enforcement -- so far.

"Privacy on the Line" isn't perfect. There are some great story lines in the cryptography narrative: On one side you have ominous agencies like the NSA; on the other, the plucky "cypherpunks," fighting to get out the code word. There's the ludicrousness of legal quirks like the classification of cryptographic technical papers as unexportable "munitions" -- and the wacky sight of institutions such as the American Civil Liberties Union getting into bed with the likes of Microsoft. Together, it's an explosive mix, and one that's a long way from being resolved.

"Privacy on the Line" is a bit too dry, precise and repetitive to do the story justice. It's also all too easy to accuse it of bias; co-author Diffie is one of the original creators of public key cryptography, a particular form of encryption technology crucial to the process of putting powerful privacy tools into public hands.

Furthermore, while it's all well and good to note that the balance of power has swung way over the line, Diffie and Landau never stop to consider the more radical goals shared by many in the pro-cryptography movement -- goals that include, ultimately, demolishing the power of the state. Forget about the Cosa Nostra using cryptographic techniques to hide electronic evidence of money laundering and extortion. Some cypherpunks make no bones about it: They live for the day when they can employ their cryptographic arsenal to cripple big bad bureaucracies like the IRS by making it impossible to trace the flow of financial transactions across the telecosm.

Diffie and Landau do address, once, the issue of whether the FBI and the NSA might actually be justified by their fears that widespread access to cheap, uncrackable cryptography could lead to an upsurge in criminal activity. But they dismiss such worries with a wave of the rhetorical hand. If chaos ensues, they argue, Congress can always mandate that the next generation of electronic devices come with government-accessible back doors attached. Chaos will then, they claim, quickly subside.

That point may deserve more scrutiny. Already, current export restrictions on cryptographically enhanced software products are an unworkable absurdity in the no-borders-world of the Web. Can the crypto-genie really be put back in the bottle?

But that's a quibble. The future is unknowable; the record of the past is all too clear. That record includes J. Edgar Hoover's surveillance vendetta against Martin Luther King Jr., the U.S. Army's files on everyone from Joan Baez to Dr. Benjamin Spock and the Reagan administration-ordered wiretapping of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. It's time to balance the scales again.
SALON | March 12, 1998

E-mail Andrew Leonard.

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B O O K++I N F O R M A T I O N:

"PRIVACY ON THE LINE: THE POLITICS OF WIRETAPPING AND ENCRYPTION"
__ BY WHITFIELD DIFFIE AND SUSAN LANDAU | MIT PRESS | 342 PAGES

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