Random Access - Friday, April 30, 1999Listen up, Big Brother
by Chris Gulker
War is peace. Peace is war.To protect your privacy, we must be able to read all of your private communications.
Remember Big Brother in George Orwell's 1984?
Big Brother didn't have a problem turning reason and truth upside down in the pursuit of a kind of paranoid 's utopia.
And, the sworn protectors of that cradle of freedom and democracy, the United States of America, don 't seem to be far from offering the same kind of "logic".
America's highest law-enforcement officials are making the case that to protect the citizens and their privacy, the government needs to keep the tools that assure privacy away from 'em.
After all, the citizens might be up to bad things. They might be criminals or terrorists, plotting heinous misdeeds.
So, reason the Feds, they need to be able to read what we write, and read what's written about us, whenever they think that's a good idea.
That's why the top U.S. Federal agencies don't want to see public use of strong encryption on the Internet. The Feds want encryption restricted to forms that are feeble or which contain an "escrow key" that allows the government (or anybody else who gets their hands on the escrow key) to snoop.
Uncle Sam wants to be able to see things we write - love letters, checks, credit card transactions and things that are written about us - our health records, legal records, job-performance reviews, letters from mom and individuals who might be a whole lot more interesting. All of these things can pass over the Internet these days.
It gets even scarier than Big Brother sifting through stuff that might be merely embarrassing. Big Brother was a two-bit piker compared to the capabilities that modern surveillors possess.
Technologies exist today that can correlate seemingly unrelated data points about individuals against larger sets of data generated by whole populations.
Such correlations can use seemingly innocent data, like credit card purchase records, to reveal, with a high probability, such information as our political leanings, sexual orientation, income level, current exact whereabouts, and more.
Without strong encryption, people in the government (and elsewhere) can pretty reliably track virtually every personal datum we possess. If we're even minimally engaged in the current world, our unencrypted records make our lives literally open books.
Never in history has humankind been so widely and voluminously recorded, transcribed, invoiced, debited, credited, cross-referenced, databased and archived.
If you live in the West, somewhere other than say, a camouflaged bivouac 40 miles outside of Nowhere, North Dakota, your routine daily acts result in an electronic trail that, with a little manipulation, can yield the most private details of your life.
Why worry, you say? I'm a law-abiding person, with nothing to fear.
Oh?
People in government are people just like us. They can make mistakes, just like we do. They can even be the heinous criminals they're supposed to be protecting us against.
In fact, in my lifetime, American government officials at every level, the Presidency included, have proven themselves not to be above using the powers of their office for personal gain.
A future Richard Nixon wouldn't have to rely on breaking into the opposition's offices. Every opponent's campaign plan (not to mention their health and legal records) would be no farther away than the nearest escrowed encryption key.
And if even if the Feds keep their noses clean, their insistence on second class encryption for the masses means the bad guys, who, by definition, aren't particularly worried about ethical constraints, will have an easier time of getting a hold of the same sorts of information.
It doesn't help that the agencies that are railing loudest against strong encryption are the very ones that have the least oversight in the American Federal pantheon.
Agencies like the National Security Agency are among the least publicly accountable organizations in all Washington's myriad bureaucracies. The very shadowy NSA makes the case loudly that strong encryption be blocked lest terrorists and the ever-to-be-mistrusted "foreign element" get their blood-drenched mits on it.
Am I missing something here?
Does the NSA really think that making something illegal will keep terrorists from using it?
The same individuals who bomb department stores during the holidays, blow airliners out of the sky and spray men, women and children at ticket counters with machine-gun fire, are going to be deterred from encrypting their messages because the Feds thinks that's a good idea?
And why do I think that making strong encryption illegal will only keep the law-abiding from using it?
But maybe these guys really believe their own logic. I should take a leaf from Big Brother's book.
Psst.. hey spooks! Stronger encryption is weaker.
A weaker threat to privacy, that is. Encrypt it, and pass it on.
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