================================================================== The BIRCH BARK BBS / 414-242-5070 ================================================================== Submitted by: THE NEW AMERICAN -- July 25, 1994 Copyright 1994 -- American Opinion Publishing, Incorporated. P.O. Box 8040, Appleton, WI 54913 414-749-3784 ================================================================== ARTICLE: American Opinion TITLE: "High-Tech Nightmare" SUBTITLE: "Traveling Big Brother's information superhighway" AUTHOR: William F. Jasper ================================================================== Since its publication in 1949, George Orwell's terrifying novel 1984 has provided a foreboding look at a possible future world in which both man and machine have become mere instruments to serve the evil purposes of the totalitarian state. In the book's opening chapter, through the eyes and mind of protagonist Winston Smith, we gradually glimpse and feel the suffocating omnipresence of an omnipotent government. Smith and other tragic inhabitants of his grim world can scarcely look in any direction without coming under the watchful gaze of the ever-present visage of the black-mustachioed, Stalinesque Big Brother. Beneath the ubiquitous posters of the supreme dictator blares the caption: BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. In the grotesque world of Big Brother we see the individual stripped of all freedom, worth, dignity, and privacy. Technology is harnessed to penetrate and subjugate every area of their lives, even their dreary, pathetic homes. This is the chilling description of Smith's apartment: The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. Our technological capabilities today are more than adequate to implement this same kind of Orwellian nightmare, and politically we are headed in that direction. In the past year the Clinton Administration has been aggressively pushing a number of statist, privacy-invading initiatives that have groups and individuals all across the political spectrum screaming "Big Brother." Clinton proposals for a national identification card, a national "information super highway," and installation of a federal "Clipper chip" in our telephones, computers, fax machines, and other electronic devices to allow government monitoring certainly justify the concern that we have embarked on the "slippery slope." It is perfectly apropos, of course, that Bill Clinton's Orwellian statist programs be introduced with Orwellian "Newspeak," in which words often mean the opposite of what we normally take them to mean. In 1984 the Ministry of Truth proclaims, "War Is Peace," "Freedom Is Slavery," and "Ignorance Is Strength." In like manner, the Clinton Administration seems to be saying, "Intrusion Is Privacy." With its Clipper chip proposal, Team Clinton is saying, in effect: "In order to protect your privacy, Fedgov has to have the ability to invade your privacy -- but you can trust us not to." The Clinton pitch is playing to a real and legitimate concern. In this "information age" our lives are transparent. Our employment history, credit rating, banking transactions, school and medical records, shopping habits, travel, telephone and electronic communications, and many other intimate details of our personal lives are floating in the ether of cyberspace, available for abuse by government, commercial interests, hackers, personal enemies, or other interested parties. In order to protect against unauthorized use of this information, many individuals, companies, and institutions are making use of data and voice encryption devices and software. But encryption, says the Administration, threatens legitimate law enforcement interests, by making it very difficult or impossible for police agencies to decipher wire taps of dangerous criminal and terrorist elements. The growth of digital telephone technology and new computer-enhanced efficiency techniques that allow compressing, hopping, and spreading of telephone and data transmissions has already made phone tapping extremely hard. The Administration's solution is to force the private telephone systems to develop software that will track and decipher transmissions, and to give the government a monopoly on encryption. Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh are pushing Congress to enact requirements that telecommunications providers -- local telephone services, cellular phone companies, wireless services, long distance networks, etc. -- be able to intercept targeted telephone calls and data transmissions. The FBI is not proposing to dictate how companies will accomplish these surveillance tasks; it simply wants to impose a three-year deadline for companies to come up with methods and technology to do them. Freeh says that in the digital information age the American people must be willing to give up a degree of personal privacy in exchange for safety and security. Moreover, said the FBI head in an interview earlier this year in which he defended the Clinton Administration's support for the Digital Telephony and Communications Privacy Improvement Act of 1994, taxpayers would be asked to pay up to half a billion dollars to develop the computer software necessary to secure the telecommunications infrastructure. "The costs are high, but you have to do a cost-benefit analysis," said Freeh. "The damage to the World Trade tower and the economic interests of the country are conservatively estimated at $5 billion," he said, referring to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. "I think the American people will agree that this is a credible solution to the problem we face."* Credible? Hardly. Dangerous? Absolutely. Not only are the Clinton proposals doomed to failure as effective law enforcement measures against criminals, but they are threatening precedents that would invite government abuse. "Do not be fooled," the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an industry lobbying group, warned on its computer bulletin board. "The FBI scheme would turn the data superhighway into a national surveillance network of staggering proportions." In March, the Digital Privacy and Security Working Group, a coalition of computer professionals, companies, trade associations, and privacy groups, wrote a letter to President Clinton, challenging the Administration's proposed digital telephony bill. "We still see no evidence that current law enforcement efforts are being jeopardized by new technologies," the group told the President. "Nor are we convinced that future law enforcement activities will be jeopardized given industry cooperation." So far, the Administration and other advocates of the new federal surveillance powers have not cited any specific cases where criminals have eluded the long arm of the law due to encryption or failure of telephone carriers to cooperate. Undaunted, the police statists push onward. Confrontations in Congress over the Clipper chip are now underway. Hearings on the matter were held by the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 3rd. The Clipper chip is a product of the National Security Agency, the super-secret federal spy agency headquartered at Fort Meade, Maryland. According to Dr. Clinton Brooks, the NSA scientist who led the Clipper chip research team, the chip project began in 1989 and cost more than $2.5 million. "Cryptomathematicians" and other specialists from NSA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) developed a powerful encryption formula, dubbed Skipjack, which was built into a microprocessor now known as the Capstone chip, for use in computers to scramble data. The chip is embedded on a circuit board known as a Tessera Card and connected to the innards of the computer. The NSA designers then modified the Capstone chip for telephone encryption and named the new creation the Clipper chip. The Clipper/Capstone chips can either be built into the telephones, computers, and fax machines themselves or put into separate devices about the size of a video cassette tape which telephones, computers, and fax machines could be plugged into. In order for the encryption to work, both the caller and the receiver have to be using equipment with the Capstone/Clipper chips. As presently proposed by the Administration, the Clipper encryption would only be activated when two people decide they want to secure their communications and initiate encryption by pushing a button on their phones or devices. Their conversation or data transmission would then be scrambled and rendered meaningless to outsiders by the Clipper chip, since only the caller and receiver would have the "secret" numerical keys to encode and decode the transmission. Except that in the interest of "national security" and "law and order," the federal government would hold master keys to each Clipper chip. In order to protect against government abuse, the master keys would be divided in half and each half held in "escrow" by different federal agencies. (The NIST and the Treasury Department have been selected as the custodial "key escrow" agents.) Before a law enforcement agency could decode a Clipper-encrypted transmission it would have to present its search warrant authorizing the wiretap to each custodial agency. Combining the halves of the key from each "key escrow" custodian, the law enforcement agency could then decode the call. Electronic privacy specialist Winn Schwartau writes in his new book, Information Warfare: Chaos on the Electronic Superhighway, that there are a number of flaws in this plan: First, unless everyone uses Clipper, the entire effort is futile. In order for everyone to use it, it would have to become a mandate or law, therefore making other forms of encryption illegal. That will never happen in an open society. Second, for the Clipper to be accepted, the Government has to be trusted not to abuse their capabilities to decrypt private transmissions without proper court authorization, as is required today. Schwartau notes also that "since no one outside of a select few will be able to examine the internal workings of the Clipper system, we have to take on faith that the Government doesn't have a so-called back-door to bypass the entire escrow system." Considering the trustworthiness of governments throughout history, it is probably wise in such matters to remain agnostic. James Bidzos, president of RSA Data Security, a computer security firm, is one expert who remains skeptical. He sees the Clipper chip as perhaps only the "visible portion of a large-scale covert operation on U.S. soil by NSA." John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation is another nonbeliever. "Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a Peeping Tom to install your window blinds," said Barlow, in one of the most relevant and on-target comments concerning the Clipper. Clintonistas protest that Clipper opponents are getting all worked up over nothing. "Voluntary, voluntary, voluntary," says Edward A. Roback, one of NIST's computer specialists. "We're certainly not forcing anyone to use it [Clipper chip technology]." "Domestically, anybody can use whatever they want," Roback insists. "There are no domestic restrictions and, no, the Administration has no plans to propose any." Winn Schwartau is not convinced. In Information Warfare he comments: Perhaps the Government is engaged in a campaign to desensitize the American public, a sophisticated form of Information Warfare. First they attempt to pass a law, then they back off when attacked by privacy advocates and adverse publicity. Next, they make the very technology available that would have been used to implement the proposed law, if it had been passed. Then Clipper is announced and the flak hits the fan, so they back off again. They try to convince the public that Clipper really is OK. Then maybe they'll try to sneak it in another law, perhaps in a few months or a year. See what happens. Sooner or later, the reasoning goes, the public will cease to care and Clipper will become the law of the land. It is a scenario that does not take great imagination to conjure. It depends upon who is behind Clipper, the depth of their pockets, their political wherewithal, and their motivation and resolve. Right now it is the federal government that is behind Clipper, and it has pretty deep pockets. As the largest buyer and user of computer and telecommunications equipment and services, it is in a good position to force "voluntary" adoption of its favored technologies and policies. Defense contractors and other major providers of products and services to government agencies may soon find themselves forced into the situation of either adopting Clipper technology or losing government contracts. "It's starting to look like economic coercion -- use this or else -- even though the [Clipper] standard is supposed to be voluntary," says David Peyton, vice president of the Information Technology Association of America. Daniel Wietzner of the Electronic Frontier Foundation agrees. "The government is going to use its purchasing power to try and make this a de facto standard," he argues. The only currently available Clipper chip product is the AT&T Surety Telephone Device 3600, which sells for about $1,200. The federal government is ordering thousands of them even though it is an unproven commodity. "The Clipper chip was developed in secrecy," notes Jim Schindler, an information security manager at Hewlett-Packard, "and everyone begins to question its strength without peer review." The Clipper "flunked" its first equivalent of limited peer review. On June 2nd of this year news accounts reported that a computer scientist at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Dr. Matthew Blaze, had discovered a basic flaw in the Clipper technology. He didn't break the code; in fact, just the opposite -- he found a weak link in the Clipper chip that would allow users to further scramble their transmissions so that they couldn't be decoded by the government even with the use of its escrow keys. If this is the case -- and the NSA has not disputed Dr. Blaze's findings -- the Clipper will be no more useful for apprehending criminals and terrorists than other encryption devices and software programs that law enforcement cannot decode. The NSA has all but conceded that the Clipper flaw exists, but has attempted to minimize its significance. "Anyone interested in circumventing law- enforcement access would most likely choose simpler alternatives," the NSA's director of policy, Michael A. Smith, said in a written statement issued in response to the Blaze report. "More difficult and time-consuming efforts, like those discussed in the Blaze paper, are very unlikely to be employed." This is a very significant and interesting admission. Smith seems to be conceding that: 1) with sufficient knowledge, resources, and motivation, criminals could evade Clipper via the Blaze technique; and 2) there are ways to evade Clipper's surveillance requiring even less knowledge, resources, and motivation than the Blaze method. Either way, it is the ostensible targets of Clipper -- criminals and terrorists -- who are most likely to have the knowledge, resources, and motivation to evade the technology. That leaves the average, law-abiding citizen as the logical primary target of the Clipper. There is a parallel here, of course, with the Clinton drive for more gun control laws, which (as always) are ignored by the criminal element and serve only to penalize and criminalize the responsible gun owner. But the cult of Big Brother is not stopping with surveillance of telecommunications; Clipper is just the beginning. According to the computer industry journal PC Week, "The Clinton administration is working on creating an identification card that every American will need to interact with any federal government agency." In its May 9th issue, PC Week reported, "Sources close to the administration said President Clinton is also considering signing a pair of executive orders that would facilitate the connection of individuals' bank accounts and federal records to a government identification card." According to PC Week, the national ID proposal was presented by the U.S. Postal Service in April at the Card Tech/ Secure Tech Conference in Crystal City, Virginia as a "general purpose U.S. services smart card" to be used by individuals and companies when sending or receiving electronic mail (E-mail), transferring funds, and interacting with government agencies. The computer weekly reported that Postal Service representative Chuck Chamberlain outlined at the conference "how an individual's U.S. Card would be automatically connected with the Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Treasury, the IRS, the banking system, and a central database of digital signatures for authenticating E-mail and other transactions." "While the U.S. Card is only a proposal," noted PC Week, "the Postal Service is prepared to put more than 100 million of the cards in citizens' pockets within months of administration approval, which could come at any time," according to Chamberlain. "There won't be anything you do in business that won't be collected and analyzed by the government," charges William Murray, a security consultant to accounting firm Deloitte and Touche in New Canaan, Connecticut, who attended the Crystal City conference. "This is a better surveillance mechanism than Orwell or the government could have imagined." The "smart card" is also a central feature of the Clinton "health care reform" program. However, some "Friends of Hillary" have even grander visions. Mary Jane England, MD, a member of the executive committee of the White House Health Project and president of the Washington Business Group on Health, a national outfit comprised of some of the nation's leading corporate welfare statists, is especially excited about the potential for implanting smart chips in your body. Addressing the 1994 IBM Health Care Executive Conference last March in Palm Springs, California, Dr. England said: The Smart Card is a wonderful idea, but even better would be capacity not to have a card, and I call it "a chip in your ear, " that would actually access your medical records, so that no matter where you were, and if you came into an emergency room unconscious -- and for those of you who treat or know anything about adolescents, forget the card because they're not going to have the card when they need it anyway -- [we would have] some capacity to access that medical record. We need to go beyond the narrow conceptualization of the Smart Card and really use some of the technology that's out there. The worst thing we could do is put in place a technology that's already outdated, because all of you are in the process of building these systems. Now is the time to really think ahead.... I don't think that computerized, integrated medical records with a capacity to access through a chip in your ear is so far off and I think we need to think of these things. Considering the Orwellian mind-set of the Clinton regime, the Administration's fervent campaign for creating a national (federally funded and controlled) "information network" that will "link every home, business, lab, classroom and library by the year 2015" becomes positively frightening. This is the same Administration, remember, that is advocating a huge new National Police Corps; implementing warrantless searches for firearms; advocating severe restrictions on firearms ownership by law-abiding citizens; usurping control of state jurisdiction over law enforcement and criminal justice; and attempting to purge all religious expressions and symbols from the workplace. It is the same Administration that wants to take away your right to medical privacy, but refused to make the records of its own health care task force public (and even defied a court order to do so). It is the same regime that (whether through criminal malice or criminal incompetence) wielded its police powers in such a blatantly tyrannical fashion that it is responsible for the deaths and incineration of more than 80 members of an arguably harmless religious sect. With due respect to Electronic Frontier's Mr. Barlow, trusting this government to protect your privacy and your rights is more like asking Jack the Ripper to install the locks on your home. END OF ARTICLE ================================================================== THE NEW AMERICAN -- July 25, 1994 Copyright 1994 -- American Opinion Publishing, Incorporated. P.O. Box 8040, Appleton, WI 54913 ==================================================================