IP: Clipper III!

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

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               CLIPPER III PROPOSAL LEAKS FROM THE WHITE HOUSE
     SENATOR LEAHY TO APPEAR ON HOTWIRED WIREDSIDE CHAT ON 5/22/96 4PM EST


                           Date: May 20, 1996


         URL:http://www.crypto.com/            crypto-news () panix com
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Table of Contents
        How to receive crypto-news
        Excerpts from VTW BillWatch #47


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CLIPPER III: HAS THE WHITE HOUSE LEARNED ANYTHING? (Shabbir J. Safdar)


[For more information on the encryption debate, see the Encryption Policy
 Resource Page at http://www.crypto.com/ ]


Interactive Week (http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/ has an exclusive story
today by Will Rodger about the revival of the Clipper plan for key escrow.
For those of you not up to speed on the encryption debate, here's a quick
summary.


Encryption is a technique for scrambling your email or phone conversations
in such a way as to prevent eavesdroppers from listening in.  Using one or
more decryption "keys" that are kept very secret, two people can communicate
in a way that ensures their privacy not through laws, but through the strength
of the underpinning mathematics.  This thrills most people, as privacy is
as old as apple pie, and many people take it for granted when communicating
with their doctor, spouse or partner, their business partner, or their lawyer.


However law enforcement advocates claim that encryption will eliminate their
ability to perform wiretaps in the future.  They claim a vision of a
dystopian world where criminals plan crimes freely without regard for police
investigations.  


Neither the privacy advocate's utopian world of total privacy, nor the
nightmare surveillance world of Hoover's "old-style FBI" is something our
society is likely to be comfortable with.  However it is not unreasonable
that individuals who wish to have a private conversation be allowed to have
them, without forcing the public and an entire industry to jump through
technical and social policy hoops.


This brings us, rather quickly, to the key escrow and Clipper debates.  All
three Clipper programs are somewhat different, but all three possess a major 
similarity: the decryption keys which one usually holds very secret are given
to a third party.  This would allow law enforcement to decrypt and read
your communications at will without your knowledge, provided they had already
obtained a copy through some other means.


The best analogy to this involves real life keys, such as your house keys
or your car keys.  For example, most of us don't give a copy of our house
keys to the police, just in case they need to execute a search warrant
in the future and you've locked the door.  If we were expected to do that,
the justified public outcry would be deafening.


Clipper advocates such as Prof. Dorothy Denning have argued that it's crucial
that individuals and corporations have such an emergency recovery system,
and that the government is here to help give it us.  I say no thanks, I can
find someone I trust to hold a spare key.  I don't need the Federal
government telling me who to choose.  My lock, my key.


To both industry, the public, and apparently Congress, the past two Clipper
plans are unacceptable.  They have been met by a whirlwind of public outrage
that has done more to bring the American net-civil liberties privacy community
together than any other issue in the last three years.  Judging from the
indications in the Interactive Week article, we're in for another round of
the same old warmed over arguments.


This time, it's likely to be done without the benefit of Mike Nelson,
the previous spokesperson for the Administration on this issue.
Although his boss has been consistently on the wrong side of this issue,
his approach has always been professional in portraying what is an
extremely unpopular view in the real world.  Rumors about him being
shuffled out of the position of encryption policy spokesperson have
been in the air since this year's Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference
in Cambridge.  If this has been a move to change the public relations tactics
of the Clipper suite of proposals, the White House seems to have learned
nothing from Nelson's previous adventures.


The current proposal was floated as a trial balloon past members of the House
of Representatives.  Like kids at a carnival with BB guns, the response was a
strong letter to the White House from Rep. Goodlatte (R-VA) and twenty-six
other members, urging the President to abandon key escrow schemes altogether.
It's nice to see Congress on the right side of one of our issues without the
usually necessary public outcry.  This surely won't be the last time.


The Interactive Week story can be found at:
http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/daily/960518y.html


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REFERENCES FROM THIS ISSUE


        Encryption Policy Resource Page: http://www.crypto.com/
        HotWired's Wiredside chat http://www.hotwired.com/wiredside/
        Clipper III: http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/daily/960518y.html


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