[1462] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Building in Big Brother, from The Netly News
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Declan McCullagh)
Thu Sep 11 12:15:25 1997
Date: Wed, 10 Sep 1997 15:38:51 -0700 (PDT)
From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
To: cryptography@c2.net
---
http://cgi.pathfinder.com/netly/opinion/0,1042,1385,00.html
The Netly News Network (http://netlynews.com/)
September 10, 1997
Building in Big Brother
By Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com)
The U.S. Congress, bowing to law enforcement demands for more
wiretap powers, is preparing to approve a scheme that endangers the
personal freedom of every American.
Nobody doubts that wiretaps are useful tools for law enforcement
agents. FBI Director Louis Freeh, who as a young agent built his
career on them, knows this well.
But Freeh's plan would expand the FBI's eavesdropping ability by
building Big Brother into every word processor, every e-mail program
and every web browser. All computer software distributed after 1998
would have a special, secret backdoor for government access to your
most private files. Even your Internet provider would be deputized as
a cyber-snoop. It's the technological equivalent of requiring that
every homeowner turn over a spare copy of his front door key to the
FBI.
This is the same FBI that has a long and disturbing history of
abusing Americans' privacy. As director, J. Edgar Hoover built a
successful career out of illegal wiretaps, secret files and political
blackmail. Hoover despised Martin Luther King, Jr. -- branding him an
"obsessive degenerate" -- and once sent him an anonymous letter, using
information gathered through illegal surveillance, to encourage the
depressed civil rights leader to commit suicide. Hoover's legacy?
Having the FBI headquarters bear his name today.
This debate plays out against a backdrop of export controls on
data-scrambling software. For years, the National Security Agency has
contended that encryption is dangerous in the wrong hands, which is
why the Clinton administration considers encryption products to be
munitions. For export purposes, government bureaucrats consider Lotus
Notes to be like a B-2 Stealth bomber or an M-1 Abrams tank. This view
stems from when encryption was largely the province of soldiers and
spies -- and amply demonstrates the techno-illiteracy of President
Clinton and Vice President Gore.
Bills have been introduced in both the House and the Senate to
loosen these export restrictions, which businesses say cost U.S.
industry millions of dollars a year. A study to be released next month
by the Electronic Privacy Information Center shows that many overseas
firms aren't hindered by such Cold War rules and are free to sell
strong encryption software around the globe. Three lawsuits are
challenging the constitutionality of the government's regulations on
First Amendment grounds and have met with some success.
Of course the Eavesdrop Establishment opposes such changes. After
all, limiting freedom through hardwiring Big Brother into
communications systems has been long-standing White House policy for
at least six years. Only now, however, are the bureaucrats admitting
it. A new book by Bruce Schneier and Dave Banisar called "The
Electronic Privacy Papers" (John Wiley & Sons, 1997) reveals that the
push for demanding computer and telephone snoopability is both
long-standing and bipartisan: in 1991, George Bush ordered advisor
Brent Scowcroft to press for such controls.
The plan stalled during the 1992 election, but two years later
Clinton endorsed and Congress passed a "Digital Telephony" law
requiring that telephone companies build only networks that are easily
snoopable by the Feds. Now Freeh is waving that precedent around
Congress to justify banning software that's not readily snoopable.
"We're asking for a Fourth Amendment that works in the information
age. When it was designed by the framers, they didn't contemplate,
obviously, Digital Telephony and encryption," he told a Senate panel
last week.
Both the House and the Senate are poised to approve his plan.
Rep. Sonny Bono (R-Calif.), who once staunchly opposed such a measure,
told me yesterday that "we weren't aware of" all the issues and there
are others "we have to be concerned about." Bono and his colleagues on
the National Security committee yesterday voted 45-1 to gut "SAFE," a
House bill that would have relaxed export controls. Their amendment
gives the White House the same veto over exports it has today
Now SAFE moves to the House Commerce and Intelligence committees,
which are expected to vote on Freeh's proposal later this week.
"They're going to address some of Louis Freeh's concerns," Rep. Curt
Weldon (R-Penn.), an opponent of SAFE, told me yesterday. The Senate
already is moving in a similar direction. The sad irony, of course, is
that legislation originally designed to promote freedom may be
perverted to limit it. In a way, though, this outcome was inevitable:
the intelligence community wields enormous power on Capitol Hill.
Privacy gurus and business lobbyists are simply outnumbered and
outgunned.
If Congress doesn't have the courage to do the right thing, we
should demand they do nothing. As technologies evolve, we need to
preserve our civil liberties, and courts -- not the Congress -- are
their most reliable champion. Since any encryption bill is bound to be
corrupted in the dank legislative byways of Capitol Hill, it's now
time to turn obstructionist. We should reject all legislative changes
to encryption rules and let the courts decide.
###
