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IP: Clipper III!
From: Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>
Date: Mon, 20 May 1996 18:58:55 -0400
============================================================================= ____ _ _ _ / ___|_ __ _ _ _ __ | |_ ___ | \ | | _____ _____ | | | '__| | | | '_ \| __/ _ \ _____| \| |/ _ \ \ /\ / / __| | |___| | | |_| | |_) | || (_) |_____| |\ | __/\ V V /\__ \ \____|_| \__, | .__/ \__\___/ |_| \_|\___| \_/\_/ |___/ |___/|_| 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 If you redistribute this, please do so in its entirety, with the banner intact. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Table of Contents How to receive crypto-news Excerpts from VTW BillWatch #47 ___________________________________________________________________________ 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 ___________________________________________________________________________ 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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