Life In Cyberspace COMPUTERS IN THE ^90s Computer Whizzes Go to the Mat NEWSDAY

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

PUBLICATION DATE      Tuesday. February 8, 1994
EDITION               ALL EDITIONS
SECTION               DISCOVERY
PAGE                  71
HEADLINE              Life In Cyberspace
                      COMPUTERS IN THE ^90s
                      Computer Whizzes Go to the Mat
BYLINE                Joshua Quittner
LENGTH                78   Lines


  ON FRIDAY, WHEN the Electronic Frontier Foundation declared war on the
  Clinton Administration, the atrium of the Citicorp Building in midtown
  Manhattan was thick with brooding, alienated teenagers.
     The atrium is like that on the first Friday of every month. The
  hackers cluster around tables, peer at wired gadgets, trade computer
  printouts and read back issues of 2600 Magazine, the Hackers Quarterly,
  which sponsors these monthly get-togethers and gives the digital
  underground a fine excuse to get out of the house and meet face-to-face.
     Curiously, few people were talking about the latest panic to sweep
  the Internet: Tens of thousands of passwords and accounts had supposedly
  been captured by unknown hackers, according to an advisory piped out
  across the Net. The advisory came from the Computer Emergency Response
  Team, the federally funded security patrol of the global Internet. How
  this number  -  tens of thousands of accounts  -  was calculated is
  unclear. CERT doesn't disclose specific break-in reports, doesn't say
  who the victims were, doesn't say what, if any, damage resulted or when
  any of this occurred. It merely sounds the general alarm.
     You can believe CERT's numbers, or not. The people in this atrium did
  not, knowing all too well how hacking the Internet has been a more or
  less constant diversion over the years.
     And John Perry Barlow, does not. Barlow, who was here for his first
  2600 meeting, is a lyricist for the Grateful Dead and a former Wyoming
  rancher turned Chelsea resident. Most important, he's a cofounder of the
  Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that aims to protect the
  civil liberties of the citizens of cyberspace. The group has become a
  powerful lobbying force in Washington, helping set the agenda for
  national communications policy.
      To Barlow, the Internet break-ins are merely diverting the public's
  attention from something far more threatening to cyberspace: the Clipper
  chip.
     The Clipper is used to scramble conversations over phone lines and
  computer networks. By declaring it the standard, the government is
  ensuring that the Clipper will be built into every phone and computer
  since any company seeking to do business with the government must use
  Clipper-enhanced equipment.
     What has riled the EFF and a number of other civil liberties groups,
  as well as a coalition of large computer and telecommunications
  companies, is this: The chip has a "backdoor" that would allow
  law-enforcement agencies, with the proper court warrants, to unscramble
  conversations and eavesdrop. The government has argued it needs such
  access to thwart drug dealers and terrorists.
      To protect against abuse, a "key" will be needed to unscramble a
  conversation; the key, stored as two individual strings of numbers, will
  be held by separate agencies of the Commerce and Treasury Departments.
      But a number of businesses, including IBM and Microsoft, have
  opposed the chip because they say it will inhibit global trade  -
  foreign governments will assume that the chip's backdoor will be
  routinely used for espionage.
      And that same backdoor could make it easier for the government to
  monitor its citizens than ever before, say the EFF and others.
       Here's why: The chip will become entrenched in the information
  highway, the coming network of telephone, cable wireless networks,
  Barlow said. Most people believe that that highway will move
  communication  -   video, voice, text  -  in uniform bursts of zeros and
  ones called packets. One feature of packet networks is they can
  typically be monitored, by a network administrator, from any computer on
  the network. That's what happened last week on the Internet, the best
  example of a packet network, when intruders used "network sniffing"
  software to capture passwords.
      And that's why privacy  -  unbreakable encryption  -  is so
  important on packet networks, experts say. But the Clipper chip
  introduces encryption with a known weakness: the backdoor.
      Currently, if a police agency wants to eavesdrop, say, on a Brooklyn
  resident, it must get a court order. Then it must go to a New York
  Telephone office in midtown Manhattan, where a wiretap is installed. But
  on the information highway of the future, theoretically, that same
  police agency may be able to eavesdrop from its own office. Or from an
  officer's home. Or from anywhere  -  without the watchful eyes of an
  outside corporation.
      And that's why the EFF has decided to fight, said Barlow.
      The Washington, D.C.-based organization has been working closely
  with top technology officials in the administration on designing a
  blueprint for the National Information Infrastructure, the official name
  for the information highway. Now EFF and another organization, Computer
  Professionals for Social Responsibility, hope to launch the biggest
  letter-writing assault the government ever saw, using the Internet, a
  key portion of that highway. The estimated 15 million network users will
  be asked to sign a form letter and e-mail it to EFF headquarters, where
  it will be printed out and delivered to the White House.
      "We're going to the mattresses on this," Barlow said.


**END OF STORY REACHED**

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