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The Clipper Chip
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The Clipper Chip: Fear, Freedom, & the Singapore Question ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- You may distribute the text of this article freely, but I would appreciate knowing about anything interesting that you do with them. Tom Maddox [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reports from the Electronic Frontier: The Clipper Chip; Fear, Freedom, & the Singapore Question Tom Maddox <[email protected]> Skipjack, Clipper, and Capstone--such a nice set of names: nautical, cheerful, evocative. However they don't tell much, and what they do tell is misleading--it seems the spin doctors have been operating yet again, those malign beings who rename and reconstrue parts of reality when we're not looking. In actuality, Skipjack is an encryption algorithm (a method for encoding information), Clipper a chip for implementing Skipjack in telephones (performing the act of encoding and decoding the voice in real time), and Capstone yet another chip for doing the same thing while adding several bells and whistles--to maintain the nautical motif--which seem to include encrypting data as well as voice. In total, what they amount to, disguised by the cheerful spin, is a major governmental initiative, put forward by the White House, and supported strongly by the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Central Intelligence Agency, to reshape the nature of voice and data communications into the 21st century in the name of social control and better law enforcement. The Kennedy Administration, liberal and enlightened, got us stuck in the Cold War horrors of Vietnam; now the Clinton Administration, similarly liberal and enlightened--also technically hip and committed to information technology-- presents us with Clipper. As Kennedy & Co. fought the spread of demonic communism, Clinton & Co. fight crime presumed to be equally diabolical: pedophiles, terrorists, drug dealers are among those cited by defenders of Clipper. (What about actual Satanists, or, for instance, cannibals, slavers, and evil aliens from the Planet Zortron? I haven't heard any of them mentioned, but perhaps I haven't caught the right briefing.) How does this package of software and hardware work that is claimed to be so important to protecting us all from unspeakable horrors, or at least to preserving public order? As I say above, Skipjack is an encryption algorithm, a method for encrypting data; it is implemented in Clipper and Capstone, two chips that will be inserted in telephones and computers so that if you have such a chip installed and communicate with a device that also has one, your exchange of voice or data will be "scrambled," encoded so as to be unintelligible to anyone who listens in or intercepts your data- stream. Anyone but the right government agencies with the right court order, that is. And that is the problem. Given the proper warrants, the FBI, for example, can unlock the encryption, "unscramble" the voice- or data-stream, They would do so using "escrow keys" they or any other Federal law enforcement agency could acquire from the key- holders (currently the Feds propose that the Department of the Treasury and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, would hold the keys, which are split into two parts). In short, Clipper-style encryption would secure its users' privacy from everyone except the Federal government. The White House first proposed Clipper in April, 1993, and the response from organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and a number of corporations was immediate and almost uniformly negative. Seeing Big Brother embodied in the hardware, they balked, but so did a number of generally conservative corporate types. In fact, from cryptographic experts to common citizens, people do not much like Clipper. So the question arises, why does the White House want Clipper's capabilities so badly that it is willing to forfeit a great deal of goodwill built up among its natural constituencies in the infotech communities? The answer might come from two directions. On the one hand, "tough on crime" is perceived by politicians as the safest political position this election year, never mind the details, and the Clinton folks have done all they can to stake a claim to this position. As has been remarked ad nauseam in the media, they do not want look soft on crime. They are selling Clipper as being tough on crime. On the other, the NSA (the super-secret "puzzle palace" with headquarters in Building A at Fort Mead, Maryland, for those who haven't paid much attention to this sort of thing), the FBI, and the CIA have convinced the White House that unspeakable horrors will come to pass if their current ability to tap phones becomes impaired or even disappears due to the spread of digital telephone equipment and cheap and easy encryption-- both of which are spreading rapidly. For instance, FBI Director Louis Freeh, speaking to the Executives' Club of Chicago last year, gave the following scare quotes concerning a world without Clipper: The country will be unable to protect itself against terrorism, violent crime, foreign threats, drug trafficking, espionage, kidnapping and other grave crimes. Advanced technology will make it impossible for the FBI to carry out court-approved surveillance in life-and-death cases. And James K. Kallstrom, the FBI's chief of investigative technology, has a more gothic imagination; he says, "I don't have a lot of dead bodies laying [sic] around here or dead children from an airplane explosion that we haven't been able to solve--yet." For lack of Clipper, various law enforcement folks assure us, the Feelthy Drug Lords of Medellin could laughingly twirl their greasy moustaches as they further their hideous conspiracies in safety; likewise, various conspiracies of fanatic Arabs; likewise, pedophiles everywhere A terrible picture emerges: drug-suckers everywhere, in a landscape of falling airplanes and exploding skyscrapers, and as to the children--well, the scenes are too horrible to contemplate: all for want of Clipper. Worse yet, as we're assured by Dorothy Denning, professor at Georgetown University and almost sole designated defender of Clipper, things could happen which we, the citizenry, cannot and should not know: [I]t is not possible for most of us to be fully informed of the national security implications of uncontrolled encryption. For very legitimate reasons, these cannot be fully discussed and debated in a public forum. It is even difficult to talk about the full implications of encryption on law enforcement. This is why it is so important that the President and Vice-President be fully informed on all the issues, and for the decisions to be made at that level. In short, Clinton and Gore must know the whole horrible truth about a Clipperless world, and the rest of us must simply let them decide what is to be done. Such arguments, while perhaps compelling to some--certainly to monarchists, for instance--do not seem appropriate to the United States. Here we put up with the routine slaughter of thousands of our citizens in the name of the right to bear arms, with disgusting pornography and with neo-Nazis and political goofballs of every possible persuasion in the name of the right to free speech; where we grant tax breaks to people and organizations espousing the most lunatic religious beliefs. In short, in the United States we manifest what many in other countries regard as an unreasonable attachment to individual liberties and individual privacy. Clipper challenges that attachment once again. Underneath the technical detail lies what I have come to think of as the "Singapore question." Singapore has become quite famous lately for the relentlessly draconian nature of its laws and punishments and for what is presumed to be consequent orderliness of behavior there. Some Americans deplore this kind of authoritarian culture (for instance, see William Gibson's article, "Disneyland with the Death Penalty," in the September/October, 1993 issue of Wired), while others look longingly at a society virtually free of the kinds of routine semi-barbarism that often characterize life in American cities: littering, graffiti, generalized vandalism, muggings, robbery, theft, and so on. So they ask, as do many citizens of Singapore, how the people of the United States can presume to condemn practices in Singapore when the fruits of liberty in this country have become so noxious, perhaps even poisonous. So the Singapore Question is, how much chaos are you willing to endure in the name of liberty? or how much liberty are you willing to forfeit in order to secure a more orderly society? In this context, certain largely theoretical forfeitures of liberty seem less threatening than they might during times when most citizens feel safe, secure, and, as Americans have been wont to feel, privileged. After all, whatever our abstract principles, if we do not engage in the large-scale transport of cocaine, the bombing of public places, or the sexual abuse of children, what have we to fear? Is the FBI, NSA or CIA really likely to get a court order to listen to our privacies? Furthermore, with Clipper we can protect our communications from all other eavesdroppers, both casual and determined (such as practitioners of corporate espionage). Almost inarguably Clipper would give us more privacy of communication in day- to-day life than we now possess--after all, many of our cordless phones can be listened to with the simplest scanning device, and most of our phone lines will yield their secrets to anyone equipped with alligator clips and a headset. But unfortunately for the Clinton Administration's desire to play on public fear of drug dealers, pedophiles, and terrorists, hardly anyone other than the above-named government agencies and Dorothy Denning buys into this argument. Time Magazine published the results of a recent survey which showed that 80% of those told about Clipper opposed it. Unfortunately for civil libertarians, however, Clipper nonetheless will not go away. After backing off a few steps, the Clinton White House reaffirmed its committment to instituting Clipper. However, Congress has planned hearings on the matter, which should be taking place around the time you are reading this column. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) of the Senate Judiciary's Technology and the Law Subcommittee will chair hearings beginning May 3, 1994, 9:30 a.m., Hart Building, Room 216; contact 202-224-3406 for more information. Also, the House Science, Space and Technology Subcomittee on Technology, Environment and Aviation will be holding a hearing concerning both Clipper and the FBI "Digital Telephony" proposal; it will be chaired by Rep. Tim Valentine (D-NC) and is scheduled for May 3, 1994, 1 p.m., Rayburn Building, Room 2318. Mike Godwin, legal advisor to EFF, lately remarked in an article in Internet World, April, 1994 (I recommend the entire article), [L]imits 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. Thus, along with Godwin and other civil libertarians, my answer to the Singapore Question insofar as it concerns Clipper is simple: citizens should have the right to encrypt our communications in a manner that would not allow any government agency, no matter how well-intentioned, to decipher them; hence, no Clipper. As they say on the net, your mileage may vary. While I have made my own position clear in this column, I do not presume that it is yours. Whatever our individual stances on Clipper, one thing seems certain to me: we should not allow the White House and its allies to institute a technology with such broad and deep effects without the informed consent of the citizenry of the United States. If you want to find out more about Clipper, information is available on the Internet: by ftp at ftp.eff.org and ftp.cpsr.org, at Gopher servers at ftp.org and wired.com. You can receive an index of available information from Wired by e-mailing [email protected] and putting one line in the message: "send clipper.index". I also highly recommend two articles in the April, 1994 Wired: John Perry Barlow, "Jackboots on the Infobahn," and Brock N. Meeks, "The End of Privacy." Usenet newsgroups such as sci.crypt, comp.org.eff.news, comp.org.eff.talk, alt.privacy, alt.security, and alt.wired also carry the latest news about Clipper. If you want to oppose or support Clipper, you can use the usual channels (such as phoning the White House or your Congressional representatives). If you want to oppose Clipper, you can also endorse the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility "Petition to Oppose Clipper" by sending e-mail to [email protected] with the message: "I oppose Clipper", in which case your name will be added to the petition, and you will receive a return message confirming your vote. If the forces of social control get their way, they will usher in a Brave New World in which we will have to know how to encrypt the data on our computers and across our modems; the good news is, we can. In the next column, I'll continue this discussion by taking up the current state of public-key cryptography and considering the FBI's other pet project to control communication, the Digital Telephony Act. Personal Health Bulletin: As Locus announced, I had coronary bypass surgery in early February, and now, three months later, I feel great--better, in fact, than I have in many years (years during which my coronary disease was misdiagnosed, but that is another story). I would like to thank deeply everyone who called, wrote, sent e-mail and otherwise expressed wishes for my health. ======================================================================= This document is from the WELL gopher server: gopher://gopher.well.com Questions and comments to: [email protected]