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Privacy & Anonymity: TOO MANY SECRETS? Privacy & Anonymity: TOO MANY SECRETS?
Is the modern Cypherpunk a hero, fighting for the rights of privacy and the perpetuation of democracy throughout Cyberspace, or a threat to national security, an insidious outlaw bent on manipulating our legal system to secure a marketplace for espionage and drug trafficking? The Internet has been used as a forum for this debate between Cypherpunks, those who promote privacy by the widespread use of encryption, and authority-types who would suppress the public for "its own good". In 1984, Phil Zimmerman wrote Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), encryption software for the masses. RSA encryption, the technique employed by PGP was invented at MIT by Rivest, Shamir and Adleman and offers even the uninitiated computer user a powerful algorithm capable of stumping the most super of computers. For fairly arcane mathematical reasons, once a series is encoded with the public key, it can only be decrypted with the private key. I send my ten-thousand closest friends my public key, and they use it to encrypt the email they send me. Once encrypted, only my private key can reveal its contents, and I am the only one who has my private key.
"You can have my encryption algorithm...when you pry my cold dead fingers from my private key." This method ensures almost total privacy over many very public communications lines. "The Power" fears that total privacy will lead to anarchy. They're afraid that all the trade secret-stealers, drug smugglers, mobsters, gangsters, big-arms, no-gooders and boogey-men will use encryption too. And in fact, what's to stop them? Don't they have the right to communicate in privacy just like everyone else? PGP offers powerful encryption with little knowledge overhead. The casual emailer can generate and use keys with ease. And the software is free for all who want it. Why? Because PGP's author is committed to preserving privacy and moving the power to the people, and has chosen encryption as his modus operandi. Without privacy, bringing the whole world up to digital speed will mean that more credit card numbers, medical information, bank accounts, whereabouts, and the names of the family pets will be available to anyone with the know-how and technology to intercept the information. So is there a middle-of-the-road? Bill Clinton thinks so.
"San Francisco, April 15,1993 - The Clinton Administration plans a new system of encoding electronic communications that is intended to preserve the Government's ability to eavesdrop for law enforcement and national security reasons while increasing privacy for businesses and individuals." Clinton's idea, called the Clipper chip, operates under RSA encryption- just like PGP. It can be used to encode everything from the signals transmitted by cellular phones to ATM numbers. It's blueprint however, contains a backdoor that allows any authority with privledge to the key to decrypt "sensitive" information, thus preserving the government's leash on privacy. Whether implemented in our everyday lives or not, the message is sent loud and clear that, "We fear change=we fear privacy." The government's approach to encryption has typically been secrecy, restricting information under a CONFIDENTIAL veil. While difficult to tell how great an effect the release of encryption algorithms have on national security, the classification of "how-to" documents has come under wide debate in the legal system. Recently, citizens who want to know more about encryption are using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to pry reclassified documents from the grip of the NSA. Encryption is not going away, and neither is privacy. Version 2.0 of PGP was distributed from New Zealand to side-step US export laws. Clipper is not being used nearly to government expectations. The FOIA is providing the release of documents to the cypherpunk community and the public at large. Companies like Apple, Microsoft, Novell, and AT&T plan to integrate RSA software into their systems. But perhaps the government is right.
"We have the capability of 100% privacy, but if we use this I don't think society can survive." Maybe professors at universities across the country will be plagued by anonymous death threats from riled students. But on the other hand, a private future cannot be the cause of all the villainy in the world. Perhaps our society won't survive, what with all the upcoming technologies, changes are likely - isn't that called progress?
"We are not asking to threaten the national security. We're asking [the NSA] to discard a Cold War bureaucratic idea of national security which is obsolete...The decision to literally trade away our privacy is one that must be made by the whole society, not made unilaterally by a military spy agency." Outlets for the expression of your crypt-opinions: 1. Interact! Join the arguments for and against in the news under Sci.Crypt. 2. Send email to Clipper.petition@cpsr.org with the sentence "I oppose Clipper" as your message and you will be signed on to an electronic petition against the use of the chip. Or, to find out more about Clipper, subscribe to the CPSR newsletter by sending email to listserv@cpsr.org with "SUBSCRIBE CPSR-ANNOUNCE First Last" as your message. 3. You can collect information about encryption from the following
sites: 4. PGP v2.0 is available for download from: PC's and compatibles: gatekeeper.dec.com: /pub/micro/msdos/pgp Boulder Software Engineering |
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