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LOST IN KAFKA TERRITORY
From: Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 1995 01:01:00 -0500
Copyright, 1995, U.S. News & World Report All rights reserved. U.S.NEWS & WORLD REPORT, APRIL 3, 1995 LOST IN KAFKA TERRITORY THE FEDS GO AFTER A MAN WHO HOPED TO PROTECT PRIVACY RIGHTS If anyone on Earth can claim to be a cyberspace celebrity, it is Philip Zimmermann, a soft-spoken data security consultant from Boulder, Colo. Every day, he is discussed on the Internet and computer bulletin boards in nearly 200 countries and is deluged with E-mail that treats him as a hero, a villain or a victim. This week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a cyberspace civil liberties organization, will give Zimmermann a prestigious Pioneer Award, for helping protect citizens' privacy by creating a powerful encryption program called ``Pretty Good Privacy'' (PGP) and making it available for free. It has been a boon to those seeking to protect their E-mail and commercial transactions and, in some notable cases abroad, shielding communications by human-rights groups and dissidents in repressive countries. But law enforcement and intelligence officials have a different view of Zimmermann's achievement. He is being investigated for possible violation of federal arms-export laws because his ``cryptography for the masses'' has slipped out of America. ``The ability of just about everybody to encrypt their messages is rapidly outrunning our ability to decode them,'' worries a U.S. intelligence official. ``It's a lot harder to eavesdrop on a worldwide web than it is to tap a cable.'' Echoes James Kallstrom, assistant director in charge of the FBI's New York office: ``We need balanced public policy because it has unbelievable ramifications for business and law enforcement.'' ``STRENGTHEN DEMOCRACY.'' There is no coherent policy, and Zimmermann could end up paying for that. He says he feared for Americans' privacy rights and decided to give away PGP in 1991 because Congress was considering banning it. (No law ever passed.) He says he gave the program to friends, asking them to distribute it only in the United States: ``I wanted to strengthen democracy, to ensure that Americans could continue to protect their privacy.'' But the encryption program ended up on the Internet and has been downloaded by countless foreigners. So a grand jury in San Jose, Calif., has been gathering evidence since 1993, pondering whether to indict Zimmermann for violating a federal weapons-export law--a charge that carries a presumptive three-to-five-year sentence and a maximum $1 million fine. The investigation is being led by Silicon Valley Assistant U.S. Attorney William P. Keane; a grand jury indictment must be authorized by the Justice Department in Washington. Zimmermann's woes raise big questions. Can machine-age law be applied fairly to rapidly developing technology? Is putting software on a computer the same as exporting it? Is he being strung out in a Kafkaesque nightmare as a warning to others? Some intelligence officials concede that it's too late to keep cryptography from spreading and say that intimidating distributors is the only way they can hope to deter code makers. Beyond those issues, the case is saturated with irony. Powerful crypto is already widely available on Internet-accessible computers. An MIT Internet site distributes PGP, for example, as does a forum on the CompuServe commercial service. The latter--easily reached via phone lines from Europe and Asia--carries this impotent disclaimer: IF YOU ARE NOT A CITIZEN OF THE UNITED STATES, DO NOT DOWNLOAD THIS FILE. Oddest of all, it is perfectly legal for a foreign bad guy to buy books containing encryption codes and type them into a computer. OOPS! If Zimmermann is indicted as an alleged arms merchant because his cryptography ended up in foreign hands, then somebody in the U.S. government probably should be prosecuted, too. In 1993, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) inadvertently placed DES, a strong encryption program, on one of its Internet-linked computers. Word spread quickly in cyberspace, and a U.S. NEWS reporter easily found a file copy on a computer in Finland. A NIST spokesman sheepishly admitted that the accidental crypto ``export'' was a mistaken attempt to help U.S. computer users strengthen their security. Zimmermann says his motivation was also security-minded. It isn't comforting to him, though, that he might be hanging his Pioneer Award in a prison cell. BY VIC SUSSMAN
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- LOST IN KAFKA TERRITORY Dave Farber (Mar 28)