[2616] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Why human rights workers need strong encryption
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Declan McCullagh)
Thu Apr 30 17:05:24 1998
Date: Thu, 30 Apr 1998 13:58:33 -0700 (PDT)
From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
To: cryptography@c2.net
http://cgi.pathfinder.com/netly/afternoon/0,1012,1948,00.html
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 30 Apr 1998 16:14:33 -0400
From: Jonathan Gregg <jgregg@PATHFINDER.COM>
To: AFTERNOONLINE@LISTSERV.PATHFINDER.COM
Subject: Afternoon Line April 30, 1998
Tu Casa Es Mi Casa
Spend five minutes talking with Patrick Ball about government-sponsored
rape, torture and murder, and your views on privacy will change.
Spend half an hour listening to the bearded 32-year-old human rights
campaigner, as an audience did at the libertarian Cato Institute this
afternoon, and you'll be scared shitless.
Ball, who works at the American Association for the Advancement of Science,
describes how human rights workers are vulnerable to not just assault and
torture, but information theft as well.
In Haiti and El Salvador, he said, the military has controlled the
telephone company. When a U.N. investigator was detained at an airport in
the Congo two weeks ago and separated from his luggage, his notes from
hundreds of interviews were read and apparently photocopied.
"This information should have been in electronic form, and encrypted," Ball
says. He argues that human rights groups need strong encryption without any
"key recovery" backdoors, since governments may share decoding information.
Case in point: A highly paid CIA agent, Col. Julio Alpirez of the
Guatemalan army, tortured a guerrilla commander in 1992. Another Guatemalan
officer, Col. Juan Valencia Osorio, has been indicted for the 1990 murder
of a researcher investigating mass killings.
Valencia held a "secret" security clearance from the U.S. Department of
Defense, according to recently declassified documents.
"Human rights groups have reason to be concerned that if the Department of
Defense or the CIA have legitimate access to escrowed keys," they might
share them, Ball says. In other words, while our spooks may not do the
dirty deeds themselves, they're friends with folks who do.
Here in the U.S., the FBI has proposed banning manufacture and distribution
of encryption products without such backdoors for government surveillance.
But that bill is stalled in Congress, and few countries are likely to
follow, says David Banisar of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
"There are five or six countries with restrictions on cryptography," he
says, and those include such liberty-loving places as China and Singapore.
--By Declan McCullagh/Washington
http://www.aaas.org/spp/crypto/crypto.htm
http://www.cato.org/
