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And here on WBAI New York, it's 10 o'clock on a Wednesday night.
That means it's time for Off the Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a call.
It couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would.
I hope that's understood, but really, no!
Good evening, everybody.
This is Off the Hook, with your host, Emanuel Goldstein.
We'll be together until 11 o'clock tonight, and we have a fun topic to talk about tonight.
As a little preview, I'd like to read a slight excerpt from a story by a reporter that's
been on this program more than once, Brock Meeks, out of Washington, D.C.
A beast known as the Clipper Chip, which we've talked about many times here on this program.
A device, quoting Brock here, a device that can be installed in virtually any communications device.
The chip scrambles all conversations.
No one can crack the code, except the government, of course.
The feds hold all the keys.
Or rather, they hold the only keys that matter.
Each Clipper Chip is made with three unique keys.
All three are needed to scramble the encrypted messages streaming through them.
But only the government's keys matter.
The key you get with your Clipper Chip is essentially a Clip's, the chip's, social security number.
You'll never actually see this key, have any idea what its number is, or get your hands on it.
If you try to sneak a peek at it, the damn thing self-destructs.
The other two keys will be held in electronic vaults.
Fraternal twins, separated by mandate.
Each of these keys will be held by government agencies, called escrow agents.
One will be held by the National Institute for Standards and Technology.
The other by the Automated Systems Division of the Department of Treasury.
When a law enforcement agency, which could be your local sheriff's department,
wants to wiretap a conversation that's been encrypted by Clipper,
they apply to each of the escrow agents.
The agents send their respective key electronically to a black box, operated by the law enforcement agency.
As encrypted conversations stream into the box,
they come out the backside in nice, neat-sounding vowels and consonants,
or, in the case of electronic mail, in plain old ASCII.
Yes, all law enforcement agencies need a court-approved wiretap before they can pull this whole scheme off.
This, the administration says, is where your privacy is protected.
We're not going to use Clipper to listen in on the American public, said Raymond Kammerer of NIST.
It will only be used to catch criminals.
Honest.
This ain't no quiz show.
It ain't about what you know.
It's how you materialize.
The words that you vocalize.
That speech is alphabet.
Just a nut, but I don't fret.
Conversation repeats with coffee and cigarettes.
Larger numbers still ain't paid.
Brothers and sisters, you know what I'm saying.
Larger numbers still ain't paid.
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There's not a brother make it.
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Know the right school, soon.
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No more applause, the crowd's gone home.
Now we gotta ask them where we're gonna go.
Tell me what we're gonna do at the end of the show.
Larger numbers still ain't paid.
Brothers and sisters, you know what I'm saying.
Still ain't paid.
Yeah, it's all about knowledge.
It's all about numbers.
It's all about the clipper chip and the rules changed last Friday
in what might be kind of a surprise development.
But, you know, if you know how things work,
it's really not that much of a surprise.
It all started, I learned about this on Friday morning
when I got a copy of a CERT bulletin.
CERT being the beloved people at the Computer Emergency Response Team
out there at Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh area.
They released this advisory that pretty much said things
that everybody already knew.
In fact, if you listened to this program,
you certainly would have known it years ago.
But people on the Internet are able to get your password sometimes.
It's not a difficult thing to do.
And there have been things known as Trojan horses that have been operating,
especially ones involving the Telnet program
and various other methods of logging in.
And basically, it doesn't matter if your password is encrypted or hidden or whatever
because some people are able to figure out ways of monitoring an entire session
so that if you type something, they'll get it no matter what it is.
So it's important that system administrators recognize the signs
of this kind of thing happening.
And when something like this does happen, they go public about it
and they tell people and they encourage people to change their passwords.
We saw that a couple of months ago with the panic system,
who did the right thing.
They came out into the open and they said there was a breach of security
and this is what people have to do.
Now, if every system did that, there wouldn't be a problem, would there?
But every system doesn't.
Why did this cert advisory come out on Friday?
Actually, late Thursday.
It was weird.
There was something about it that didn't quite strike me the right way.
And of course, all the reporters ran off to do stories about this
and a lot of reporters missed the real story when that came out on Friday.
The real story being that the Clinton administration is now endorsing,
moving full speed ahead with the Clipper chip,
something that we've been talking about over the past year
since it was introduced in April.
I'll read you a bit of a press release from the Electronic Frontier Foundation
to give you an idea of just what went down on Friday,
and then we'll be talking to Mike Godwin from EFF.
At two briefings, February 4, 1994, the Clinton administration
and various agencies gave statements before a congressional committee
and later representatives of civil liberties organizations,
industry spokespersons, and privacy advocates.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's position,
based on what we have seen and heard from the administration today,
is that the White House is set on a course that pursues Cold War national security
and law enforcement interests to the detriment of individual privacy and civil liberties.
The news is grim.
The administration is not backing down on Clipper, not backing down on key escrow,
not backing down on selection of escrow agents,
already adamant on escrowed key access procedures,
not willing to eliminate ITAR restrictions,
and hiding behind exaggerated threats of drug dealers and terrorists.
Now, there was a question and answer session afterwards,
and the director of EFF, Jerry Berman, asked if there would be a report
to explain the rationale for choosing the chip and all that,
and basically they replied that there would be no report
because they have been unable to write one due to the complexity of the issue.
Now, you have to wonder, when they can't write a report about something they're talking about
because it's too complex, I don't know.
An administration spokesperson also said this was the Bosnia of telecommunications.
Now, what in God's name is somebody thinking when they say that it's the Bosnia of telecommunications
and they want to hold that up as an example?
I don't know what exactly that's going to portend,
but I'm not eager to get into that.
We have statements from all kinds of different agencies and organizations.
This comes from the Office of the Press Secretary of the White House.
They say, last April, the administration released the key escrow chip,
also known as the Clipper chip,
that would provide Americans with secure telecommunications
without compromising the ability of law enforcement agencies
to carry out legally authorized wiretaps.
Today, the Department of Commerce and the Department of Justice
are taking steps to enable the use of such technology both in the U.S. and overseas.
To implement the administration's encryption policy,
an interagency working group on encryption and telecommunications has been established.
It will be chaired by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
and the National Security Council
and will include representatives of the Departments of Commerce, Justice, State, and Treasury,
as well as the FBI, the National Security Agency,
the Office of Management and Budget, and the National Economic Council.
Whew. That is some crowd.
And you'll note the people that aren't in there.
Us.
This group will work with industry and public interest groups
to develop new encryption technologies
and to review and refine administration policies regarding encryption as needed.
Kind of like what's been happening over the past year,
except, guess what? They don't listen.
Because they went right ahead, despite what everybody has been saying.
And we'll get to that in just a little bit.
Give you an idea of the public sentiment here.
We understand that many in industry would like to see all encryption products exportable.
However, and this is kind of the patronizing part here
that the White House feels they have to say to us,
if encryption technology is made freely available worldwide,
it would no doubt be used extensively by terrorists, drug dealers, and other criminals
to harm Americans both in the U.S. and abroad.
You don't want that, do you?
They didn't say that, but they might as well have.
For this reason, the administration will continue to redistrict export
of the most sophisticated encryption devices,
both to preserve our own foreign intelligence gathering capability
and because of the concerns of our allies who fear that strong encryption technology
would inhibit their law enforcement capabilities, i.e. monitoring of their citizens.
Something you might want to get used to because it's going to be an everyday occurrence.
The administration believes that the steps being announced today
will help provide Americans with the telecommunications security they need
without compromising the capability of law enforcement agencies
and national intelligence agencies.
Today, any American can purchase and use any type of encryption product.
The administration does not intend to change that policy,
nor do we have any intention of restricting domestic encryption
or mandating the use of a particular technology.
And one more thing, and then we'll get into our discussion tonight.
Along those lines, there was a question and answer session,
and one of the questions was, will the standard be mandatory?
And the answer is no.
The administration has repeatedly stressed that the key escrow technology
and this standard is for voluntary use by federal and other government agencies
and by the private sector.
The standard that is being issued only applies to federal agencies,
and it is voluntary.
Does this approach expand the authority of government agencies
to listen in on phone conversations?
No.
Well, maybe I'm wrong.
I mean, this sounds pretty...
It doesn't sound harmful to me.
It sounds like they're thinking about the privacy, about the freedom of Americans.
It's going to be voluntary.
We don't have to use it if we don't want to.
They're not going to be listening in on us any more than they already do.
Well, with that, let's bring in Mike Ibram from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Mike, you there?
Yeah, I'm here.
By the way, I'm getting a little bit of a skip in your signal to me.
Yeah, that's the BAI phone system.
It's traditional.
Well, I can usually make out what you say,
but occasionally it'll be a little bit blocked out, so I might ask you to repeat.
Okay, well, I hope you can hear this question.
With all these reassuring words that the administration is saying,
it's not going to be voluntary, they're not going to be spying on American citizens,
what are we all so upset about?
Well, I think the administration was very clever in stopping short of making the standard mandatory outright.
They knew that that would ignite a firestorm of criticism.
On the other hand, they're throwing the full weight of the federal government behind this standard,
and that plays out in a bunch of different ways.
One thing that they're doing, for example,
is they are not relaxing export restrictions on any other cryptography technology,
not on any other encryption technology, but they will export Clipper.
So, in effect, the government is saying, you can't sell your encryption abroad,
but we can sell ours abroad, and the vendors who adopt our standards can sell abroad.
Well, the economic impact of that is fairly clear.
I mean, it gives anyone who wants to develop an alternative encryption scheme a disincentive to do it,
because the international market is an important part of the American software market.
The second thing that they're doing is that they have the NSA and the Department of Justice
essentially are doing a road show now where they go around to different government agencies
and say, adopt this standard, and one of the things that their working group,
their interagency working group is going to do is try to bring every single federal agency
into adherence into this standard, which means that anyone who wants to talk securely
to the federal government would have to adopt the Clipper standard in order to talk to them.
So it's not just the government buying Clipper phones and Clipper chips and that technology.
It's anyone who wants to talk to the government.
Well, that's a pretty big market.
The second thing that they're doing on the road show is that they're going to private developers,
and they're selling private developers on the principle of adopting the Clipper standard.
I think that for those of us who have been watching this issue for a long time,
it's fairly clear that the government, first of all, wants to suppress a mass market in encryption technology,
and they're going to take every step short of the politically impossible step of banning it
to prevent that mass market from arising.
They're not going to tell us why.
They have some rationale for what they're doing, but they're not going to share it with us.
They're not going to publish a report.
They made a show of soliciting input from industry groups and from civil liberties groups,
but they've ignored that input.
And furthermore, and this is dead certain,
the government will begin again this spring to promote the digital telephony initiative,
and that, if you haven't heard about it, is legislation that would make every phone system in the country
be required by the federal government, by federal law, to in effect be wiretap friendly, to enable wiretaps.
The government knows that if you make the entire public switch network highly wiretapable,
you also have to suppress encryption, because it doesn't matter if you have an excellent wiretap
if what you get is encrypted gibberish.
So you see two different prongs of a government effort to make sure that powerful encryption
and powerful privacy technologies do not remain in private hands.
Now, you mentioned that the full weight of government was behind this,
and I was particularly impressed by the number of different agencies
that seem to be making simultaneous announcements on Friday.
How many different agencies are involved here?
I don't know how many altogether, but you do, of course, have the NSA,
you have the Department of Justice, you have NIST,
I believe you also will have the Internal Revenue Service.
Any of the agencies that will be involved in health care reform
ultimately will be asked to adhere to this standard.
I can't yet give you a count of agencies,
but you can assume that this is going to be a comprehensive effort,
that it won't be the case that there are agencies that don't adhere to the standard.
The government is aiming to have 100% compliance within the agencies on the standard.
There's talk of making this a worldwide standard, too.
How do they plan on doing that?
Well, that's sort of a mystery.
And, you know, whenever you ask hard questions about this,
they never really give either any answer at all or a very satisfactory answer.
But it's hard to believe that someone in France would want to buy a Clipper telephone
when the keys are held by the United States Department of Justice and NIST.
I mean, why would you want to buy one?
Well, perhaps it would be linked to some sort of economic aid package?
Well, that hasn't.
I mean, we haven't seen that far into the future yet.
We do know, however, that the government does plan to make Clipper exportable,
and the government hopes that the Clipper standard will be the predominant standard in the world.
If it is, that means that the NSA will not be at a loss when it thinks it has to
overhear telephone calls and intercept communications.
Now, according to these press releases, as far as who will actually hold the keys,
and I guess we should probably preface that with an explanation as to what the system actually is,
the Attorney General has selected two U.S. agencies to hold the escrowed key components,
the Treasury Department's Automated Systems Division
and the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Now, these two organizations will be holding, each one will be holding...
Each will hold partial keys.
It turns out that you can, in effect, mathematically deconstruct an encryption key into two partial keys.
Now, they're not each half as long.
If they were, then that would make it relatively easy to crack.
But you do...
You can create, out of a single key, two partial keys, and you would need both keys together.
You'd run an operation, an exclusive or, on the two keys.
So let's take this step by step, all right?
If we have somebody who...
A complete key, which you could then use to decrypt a communication.
Go ahead.
If we have somebody, say, who is suspected by his local police of committing some sort of a crime,
they would, under this particular law, or however it's being proposed,
they would have to approach these two agencies.
Is that right?
Well, the first thing they do is get an authorization order or a search warrant from a magistrate.
So the first thing they do is they would do their normal wiretap procedure.
You know, they would have to go to a judge and say,
Your Honor, we have probable cause to believe that there is information relating to criminal activities
that's available if we can wiretap here.
And the judge would sign the authorization order after that's showing.
And with the authorization order in hand, the agency, the law enforcement agents,
would eventually go to the escrow agencies and retrieve the partial keys.
Then they'd assemble it, and then they'd intercept the communication.
All right, now how would they retrieve it?
What form would it be in?
Initially, let me, and I have to remind you that I haven't reviewed the CLPR scheme recently,
but basically there's a law enforcement access field that every packet of your communication,
your communication since it's digital, is divided into packets.
Every packet will have, as part of it, a law enforcement access field,
and that will have the serial number, as I recall, it'll have the serial number of the chip.
And then when you have the chip key, the chip serial number,
then you know which set of keys to go after when you go to the escrow agencies.
Now how would they hear this serial number?
How would they know what device you're using to communicate on?
I'm not sure how they pick out the LEAF.
I know that that's also encrypted too.
Oh, pardon me, now I know, I remember.
There's a generic family key.
In other words, every communication is at least double encrypted.
And there's a generic family key for all CLPR chips.
It's the same key for all of them.
Nobody knows it except the law enforcement guys.
And they will apply that key, and then what they get from a result of that is a clear text,
a plain text serial number for the chip plus the single encrypted,
plus what could be at least a single encrypted remainder of the message in the packet.
Well, now what that says to me is that every bit of equipment that we use,
we somehow know where we are.
If you're using your home telephone, won't that have a different serial number than, say, your car phone?
I think that's right.
Traffic analysis will be a very key component of the system,
although the government never mentions this.
It seems to be indisputable that there will be a traffic analysis capability
that will be a function of the serial numbers.
And traffic analysis just means the government can tell who you are and where you are.
Well, that in itself, apart from the wiretap capabilities,
it seems like even without wiretapping they would still be able to know where you are almost instantly.
Not only that, that's not protected information under the Constitution.
You know, your communications are protected by the Fourth Amendment, but not where you are.
All right, so now the law enforcement agency gets the two pieces of the key from these two agencies.
Now, do you know if this will come in as a disk or as something on a piece of paper?
Any idea?
Well, I think they may get it on floppy, but I'm not sure.
Okay, now once they're finished with this,
what's to guarantee that this agency will give it back or not make a copy of it?
Well, we've actually asked Ray Kamer of NIST about this particular result,
what happens when a key is cracked.
And he says, well, you should understand that that phone has been burned.
So that phone is just no longer secure.
And the way wiretap procedures normally work is that 90 days after the wiretap is over,
you receive a notice that you've been wiretapped.
You get to be told.
Right.
And at that point you say, well, if you have a Clipper phone, you know to throw it away.
You buy a new phone.
Is Clipper something that's just limited to phones, though?
No, Clipper – well, the Clipper chip is a particular implementation of the Skipjack encryption algorithm.
And that can be implemented in all sorts of products,
including computer communications, broadcasting, and anything else.
So what are some other possible uses here?
Well, they are certainly planning to encrypt –
they're certainly planning to use it to encrypt government records like health records and tax records.
But that is a big component of their plans.
I'm not sure what else they're planning to do with it.
I know that communications are at the center of their rationale for adopting the Clipper chip standard.
We, by the way, asked representatives from the vice president's office to be on the program tonight.
They referred us to the Commerce Department,
and they referred us to the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
That was all over.
They weren't able to find somebody for tonight.
However, we do intend to get somebody for a future program,
and hopefully they can answer some of these questions,
because I'd really like to hear from their point of view just exactly what it is they're thinking.
I'm curious, too.
Now, one thing that they said in the statement of the vice president on Friday –
and this kind of threw me for a loop.
I was wondering what he was thinking when he said this.
Encryption is a law-and-order issue,
since it can be used by criminals to thwart wiretaps and avoid detection and prosecution.
It also has huge strategic value.
Encryption technology and cryptoanalysis turned the tide in the Pacific and elsewhere during World War II.
And then it kind of ends right there.
That's the end of the whole statement.
So, I don't know.
Something else must have been on the vice president's mind, right?
Well, my understanding is that there was actually a documentary referring to the Enigma project on TV in the Washington area
sometime before he was asked to make that statement.
I think that was probably what was on his mind.
He was certainly quite correct that the ability to decrypt was important to win World War II.
But, you know, here we're talking about – the government says, and if we're to believe them,
it's a fairly small number, that there's a fairly small number of wiretaps per year.
State and federal totals are somewhere around 1,000, that order of magnitude.
And yet they are talking about reshaping billion-dollar industries.
They are talking about ultimately reconstructing the way the telephone system works.
But do you think they feel in the administration that they've lost control somehow?
Well, you know, it's funny.
If they had really felt that they'd lost control, I'm not sure that they'd be scrambling so hard to try and regain it.
I think that they might think – I think that if they looked very hard at this,
if they had any sort of reality checking here, they'd already know that the whole world has access to encryption technology on their personal computers.
But somehow they've been convinced, I think, that they have at least a potential of grasping some kind of control.
And they're quite correct, by the way, to think that if the government throws all its purchasing power
and all its regulatory power into promulgating a standard, there's a very good chance that the standard will be adopted.
Have any major corporations – I know AT&T is rushing to adopt this standard – are there any others?
Well, I think AT&T – it's funny.
AT&T is probably of two minds on the subject because AT&T, on the one hand, is selling a product, a clipper phone,
but on the other hand is supporting the Electronic Frontier Foundation
and has expressed concern about digital telephony and about the clipper chip,
which just goes to show you, I think, how big and sort of multi-headed AT&T is.
Well, Mike, I have a theory about that, actually.
And the theory is that AT&T emulates U.S. policy where we kind of arm both sides and see who wins.
See who wins.
Well, I mean, you know, they may think it's just prudent to be able to produce a clipper phone
because there's a chance that the clipper standard will win and they ought to be ready for the market that will form.
But, you know, I'm not inside AT&T and I don't want to try and second-guess their motives.
There's something here that you, as a lawyer, I'd certainly like to ask you about in the statement of the Department of Justice,
which came out on Friday, and that is the following.
These procedures, referring to the entire procedure for obtaining a warrant and listening in on a phone call,
these procedures do not create and are not intended to create any substantive rights
for individuals intercepted through electronic surveillance,
and noncompliance with these procedures shall not provide the basis for any motion to suppress
or other objection to the introduction of electronic surveillance evidence lawfully acquired.
Is that as sinister sounding as I make it out to be?
I think it actually is fairly sinister sounding.
What the government is saying is that we're going to put these procedures in place
to make sure that there's not any abuses of the escrowed keys.
But in case it's discovered that there has been abuse or a violation of procedure,
we're not going to give you any remedies for it.
We're not going to give you access to a civil cause of action against the government.
If you're a criminal defendant, we're not going to enable you to have evidence suppressed.
In effect, it says, if we break our rules, tough.
Well, that's quite a sweeping doctrine they're introducing here.
Right.
We were talking with Mike Godwin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation about the announcement on Friday.
Would you say it was a surprise announcement, Mike?
No, I think we knew it was coming.
In fact, EFF had every sign that this was going to happen late last fall.
We tried to get the government off the dime.
We knew if they were going to be intrusion on the standard,
then maybe if we could help create the mass market by removing export restrictions,
that was an option that was worth exploring.
But I think the sheer global magnitude of the government's announcement was unexpected.
All those mass press releases and two separate press conferences.
It was a real dog and pony show.
Yeah.
I'd like to quote a couple more things.
The announcement, by the way, was that the administration is moving full speed ahead with the Clipper chip,
which is a method of using encryption to spy on people within this country.
Law enforcement agencies will be able to monitor people pretty much at will.
Yes, they will need to get warrants and go through the due process and all that,
but it becomes a whole lot easier.
Usually when you wiretap somebody, you have to really sweat a little bit to do this.
It's not an easy thing.
This is something that certainly can be done en masse, and it can be abused, and it can be really, really scary.
I think you have to step back and you say, philosophically, there's a practical issue.
First of all, there are practical issues, and secondly, there are philosophical issues.
The government has to make its case in two ways.
It has to show that practically this system is going to work and that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
Then it has to show philosophically that this is consistent with the system of government and the Constitution that we have.
I think we've been taught correctly in our civics classes when we were growing up that this is a government of limited powers,
that we don't believe that the government starts out with absolute power,
but that it has very defined powers under the Constitution, and you have to stop and think.
First of all, how can the government justify an attempt to suppress the ability of people to talk to each other in private?
And secondly, how can the government justify keeping the very procedure and adoption of these standards secret?
I mean, this is a major public policy issue that is affecting billion-dollar industries and affecting major individual rights.
The government has to bring its case to the public, or else we don't have an open society after all.
Well, Mike, let me ask you a question which I'm sure is on the minds of some people.
What do you do about criminals? How do you wiretap those people that should be wiretapped, the terrorists?
Well, let me point out, by the way, that criminals who are smart enough to use encryption ought to be smart enough to know not to use a clipper chip,
because that is the one form of encryption that the government is guaranteed to have the keys to.
And when you ask the government about this, they say, well, we recognize that we're only going to capture stupid criminals.
And I keep thinking, well, if you're only going to capture stupid criminals, you can capture stupid criminals now.
That's not a particularly deep problem.
Just a moment.
And it's very difficult for the government to explain what class of criminals is just smart enough to think of using encryption,
but dumb enough to think that clipper is going to provide some kind of barrier against law enforcement.
With the new kinds of technology, though, does it, in fact, become harder for law enforcement to wiretap?
It's hard for me to say. I mean, the government has many methods of investigation available to it.
One of them is, I mean, there are many things that can't be stopped through powerful encryption.
For example, you know, I'm in a phone, I'm in a room with a window now.
If someone is across the street and bounces a laser beam off this window,
they can tell from the vibrations on the windowpane what's being said in this room.
A chief source of information for law enforcement investigations is informants.
Informants, in fact, are far more important to investigations than wiretaps are.
I don't believe that the issue is, will the government be able to do investigations or not?
The government will always be able to do investigations.
The issue is, will some kinds of investigations be more difficult for the government?
It's fair to say a few kinds of investigations will, in fact, be more difficult for the government.
But consider, a hundred years ago, the government couldn't wiretap because nobody had any phones.
Wiretapping turned out to be a boon, sort of a secondary benefit, of a nationwide public telephone network.
Now we have technology shifting the balance in the opposite direction,
shifting the balance in the direction, for the first time in a long time, of individual freedom and empowerment.
The government wants to stand in the way of that.
The government thinks it's perfectly fine when technological shifts increase its power,
but it's very troubled when technological shifts decrease its power.
And I think that it reveals a certain amount of hypocrisy on the part of the government
and I think that it has, as a matter of right, the ability to stop us from using powerful privacy technologies.
But they've gone on the record as saying they're not trying to stop us from using that.
Do you think that's going to change?
They don't say that.
They don't say that they're not trying to stop us from using alternatives.
What they say is, it's voluntary.
But if you ask them straight out, do you want to see a mass market encryption technology arise?
They will either not answer the question or they'll say no.
Well, now, supposing we develop a cryptology program now,
a way for people to protect themselves, to keep their conversations private,
what will the U.S. government do if we market this?
I think the government can't do anything.
I think the government has put itself in a position so that if some brave souls decide
to go ahead and push an alternative encryption technology and really push it
and it's a really value-added technology, I think the government can't stop it.
All right.
I think the government can do everything to stop it, including barring its export.
But increasingly, this technology is going to have a higher public profile
and people are going to realize that they don't have to rely on laws for their privacy.
They can rely on their own computers for privacy.
And I think that in the long run, encryption wins.
But it could be a very long run.
And the idea behind fighting now the government's attempts to get the genie back in the bottle
is to keep it from being destructive of civil liberties in the interval between now
and the time when eventually encryption technologies become ubiquitous.
I'd like to quote from Brock Meeks' story again, and then we'll go to some phone calls at 212-279-3400.
This is part of his view on it.
The White House Friday announced its endorsement of a sweeping new security and privacy initiative.
Privacy as we know it will never be the same.
All the rules have changed forever.
The catch is that the government gets to write all the rules.
You get no vote, none.
You can't even read the rule book because it's classified.
The policy is voluntary, of course.
You don't have to sign on to it.
You don't have to use government-approved encryption devices.
But if you plan to do any business with the government, you'll have to use them.
And if the government gets its way, well, you'll end up using them whether you want to or not.
You'll have no choice.
All telephones, computers, fax machines, modems, etc. will come wiretap ready.
It will be the de facto standard.
Our telephone number is 212-279-3400.
Please keep your questions to the issue at hand, which is the Clipper chip.
We're speaking with Mike Godwin, who is with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
I'd like to also give a quote from Mark Rotenberg of the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility in Washington.
He says the administration made a major blunder with Clipper.
The public does not like Clipper and will not accept it.
This proposal is fatally flawed.
The CPSR cited several problems with the Clipper plan.
The technical standard is subject to misuse and compromise.
It would provide government agents with copies of the keys that protect electronic communications.
It is a nightmare for computer securities, said CPSR policy analyst Dave Banasar.
The underlying technology was developed in secret by the NSA,
an intelligence agency responsible for electronic eavesdropping, not privacy protection.
Congressional investigations in the 1970s disclosed widespread NSA abuses,
including the illegal interception of millions of cables sent by American citizens.
Computer security experts question the integrity of the technology.
Clipper was developed in secret, and its specifications are classified.
CPSR has sued the government, seeking public disclosure of the Clipper scheme.
NSA overstepped its legal authority in developing the standard.
A 1987 law explicitly limits the intelligence agency's power to set standards for the nation's communications network.
There is no evidence to support law enforcement's claims that new technologies are hampering criminal investigations.
CPSR recently forced the release of FBI documents that show no such problems.
And finally, the administration ignored the overwhelming opposition of the general public.
When the Commerce Department solicited public comments on the proposal last fall,
hundreds of people opposed the plan, while only a few expressed support.
I will be giving out information as to what you can do.
There are many different things you can do at this point, and we'll be giving that out in just a few minutes.
Let's go to the phones. We're here with Mike Godwin from EFF.
Let's see who's out there. Good evening. You're on.
Hi. A question and a comment.
The question is, is this Clipper chip, isn't it like, isn't the technology...
I don't see how you can say that. The chips are being manufactured now.
What I'm asking is that if you're on an older switch that's not digital, let's say, can you still be decrypted or encrypted?
It's in the instrument, if I understand correctly.
In other words, the encryption will be at each end.
I take it that what you are asking is whether if two guys with Clipper phones are talking
and there's some analog phone line in between, doesn't that mean that they can encrypt?
I have no reason to believe that that's what it means.
It's perfectly possible to communicate in digital packets over analog phone lines
and digital information over analog phone lines. Your modem does that.
Okay. The comment is that, remember the polygraph, when they thought that that would work,
that would detect lies and obviously it didn't because obviously if polygraphs worked
there would be no need for courts and things like that.
Do you think this is going to happen with this?
Do I think that this is going to turn out to be something that's ineffective in fighting crime?
Absolutely. I don't believe the sort of dumb criminal theory that the FBI likes to promulgate.
I believe that there are other reasons that the government may be promulgating this standard
and they won't tell us. They won't be open about their criteria.
Thanks for the call.
The thing is about the polygraph, it may be ineffective, but they're still everywhere, aren't they?
That's right. In fact, polygraph is widely used.
And so are drug tests and all kinds of things that don't necessarily prove anything
and can be misconstrued many times in our invasions of privacy.
All right. 212-279-3400. Good evening. You're on.
Hello.
Yes, go ahead.
Thanks for my radio, pal.
Let me ask you a question. With this clipper thing that goes into effect,
will people be able to monitor your phone call without tapping in just by programming into the switch?
Will they be able to, when the clipper goes into effect, will they be able to do what?
I'm sorry, I didn't quite hear that.
There's a conversation being between two parties.
Uh-huh.
And today they either got to go to the central office and put a physical wiretap on.
They're within your basement.
Will they be able to sit at some computer terminal, because this is digital,
and just cipher off the conversation?
What they'd hope to be able to do, but the clipper chip is only one piece of the puzzle.
The other is the adoption of what I call a wiretap-friendly telephone network.
The digital telephony initiative will require that every telephone, among other things,
that every telephone service provider will enable law enforcement, in effect,
to sit at Fed Central at a computer terminal or at some other equipment
and be able to extract a clear signal of a conversation.
And then if that conversation happens to be encrypted,
they will use the keys from the escrow agencies to decrypt it.
I think what the caller is saying is true, though.
For future generations, that's exactly what law enforcement and the administration has in mind,
being able to monitor somebody from a keyboard without having to climb in basements
and do things like that to make it as easy as possible.
That's right.
So somebody can sit in Washington at the NSA or wherever
and monitor any phone call within the United States just by punching up a few keys.
Well, it's a big step in that direction.
Right. Right.
As I say, clipper is one piece of the puzzle,
but the ultimate goal, when they assemble all the pieces, will be to be able to do just that.
Is this law also saying that no one else will be able to use any other standard to encrypt it
if two parties want to have a secure communications line, that it will be illegal?
That's what I understand.
That they're using another standard or they're using their own encryption system
that would be a violation of communications law or government law?
No, there is currently not going to be any prohibition of alternative standards.
So people don't use that key then.
They'll use their own key.
Well, you see, what worries me about that is that all of a sudden,
if you don't use that key, if you're using your own encryption,
you must have something to hide.
In the words of Ed Meese, if you don't have anything to hide, you have nothing to worry about.
What if you're a law firm and you're now dealing, hypothetically,
you are a law firm dealing in a case,
and you may not want the government to know how you're proceeding.
As a lawyer, you would be not doing your client justice if you left yourself open for a possibility.
Let me just point out something, and that's that one of the premises that you're operating on
is that there will be alternative commercial encryption products.
The government hopes that by setting this standard, the market for alternatives will dry up,
so that even though, in theory and according to the law,
you would be able to use an alternative encryption technology,
as a practical matter, you couldn't go to the store and buy one.
Well, I think that people will come up with alternatives,
but to have the government mandate this standard, I don't agree with it.
I don't think the government should have the ability,
and I don't think the companies should provide the ability for the government to listen,
and that really what they need is no privacy.
The 1984 is here.
Oh, yeah.
Thank you very much for your call.
Good night.
Ten years after, 1984 is here.
It seems that way.
Wow.
I think that is the key, though, if commercial encryption is made available,
if that kind of a thing is marketed.
Do we have anything?
The EFF is currently leading an effort to support legislation that is currently in Congress
that would relax export restrictions,
because if we can open up a worldwide market for commercial encryption,
you provide incentives for commercial vendors to provide alternative encryption schemes
that they can sell to the rest of the world,
and that will create a market,
and that market will be there for you if you decide that you don't want to use the Clipper standard.
Okay.
Let's go back to the phones.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Yes, hi.
I have two questions.
The first one is, is it possible to reverse engineer the Clipper chip?
And the second one is, how does this affect the scheme that everyone is using right now,
which is pretty good?
Which is DES, the Data Encryption Standard.
I can answer that question and tell you that the government claims that the chip cannot be reverse engineered.
Physicists, I know, disagree.
It turns out that you can't disassemble the chip because,
or at least you can't reverse engineer it that way because of the way it's assembled.
But there are other ways to figure out the logic that underlies a chip,
and according to John Gage at Sun, who I talked to about this,
who's the chief technology officer at Sun,
whom I talked to about this a couple of weeks ago,
you can actually, with the right devices,
you can trace the electron paths within a chip as it's functioning,
or even when it's not functioning,
and figure out the logic of the chip.
So I am very skeptical of claims that the chip cannot be reverse engineered.
I think it probably can be,
although it would take a lot of labor and special equipment to do that.
I also have another question, if you have the time.
The question, I don't remember it right now.
Well, the other thing you asked about was what about the current encryption standard.
Yeah.
It is widely believed that DES, the Data Encryption Standard,
DES is at the end of its useful life.
It's a 1970s standard,
and these days it turns out to be not trivial,
but certainly theoretically possible to devise computers
that will break very quickly DES encryption.
Okay. Thank you.
Thanks for the call.
Thank you. Bye.
Let's take another call.
This is WBAI speaking with Mike Godwin from EFF
about the latest development in the Clipper chip.
I'd say the ball is in the people's court now.
Right.
Yeah. All right.
We'll give you instructions as to what you can do at this point.
Let's take another phone call.
Good evening.
Hello, you're on.
Okay, let's try somebody else.
Good evening, you're on.
Yeah, hi.
My question is, is it considered a wiretap
if a computer monitors a phone conversation?
In other words, if it's not a human being,
but it is a computer doing the monitoring?
The short answer is yes, that would still qualify.
Okay.
Because what I was thinking was that you were talking about
only 1,000 wiretaps per year nationwide.
Maybe they weren't counting some other kind of computer-based monitoring.
Well, you know, who knows what they're really doing?
I mean, you know, when we have these statistics
on the number of approved wiretaps, we're getting them from the government,
and you sort of have to believe the government
if you're going to accept those figures.
But at this point, we don't have at least I know of no evidence
that they're doing anything else.
Now, well, I guess this wouldn't follow,
but if two people had a conversation
and each of them was using a non-clipper chip phone,
but the phone line itself presumably would have the clipper technology in it
so that somebody could sit at a terminal, as you were saying,
and just sort of siphon off the conversation,
they would be getting gobbledygook effectively
because it would be encrypted by some method,
not a non-clipper method.
Is that true?
Right.
Theoretically?
I'll give you an example.
If you use PGP or some other, say, a public key encryption method,
and you're doing it over the telephone network of the future
that the government would like us to have,
and the government would be able to sit in a remote location
and sort of suck the signal off,
and maybe they would look for the law enforcement access field, the LEAF,
to try and identify the clipper serial number,
but if they couldn't identify a clipper serial number,
they'd know that it wasn't using clipper encryption.
Which would be a flag to watch this person, probably.
Well, you know, I mean, I think that's not an unreasonable prediction.
Okay. Thank you.
Thanks for the call.
Good evening. You're on.
Yes, I have a question.
I was wondering, is it possible, you know, will they have,
well, what I'm trying to say is,
will they, you know, have clipper labels on these encryption products?
This way people can tell whether they're...
Yeah, they'll say Big Brother inside.
Oh, yeah?
That's funny.
We'll put the stickers up.
And reverse engineering, I don't believe anything cannot be reverse engineered.
I mean, you had wireless cable, they say couldn't be de-scrambled.
They de-scrambled it, so I've heard.
And, you know, you have all these other encryption devices that have been broken into.
I'm just wondering, you know, I use encryption myself because we have data between,
you know, we have our clients who need schematics done and all that.
And I was wondering if there were, you know, anybody, you know,
once the clipper is out there, is there going to be anybody with an alternative to encryption chips
that they might want to push?
Well, this is a good time to start, I guess.
I guess I'm sorry if I didn't, because you asked sort of a long and involved question.
I'm not sure I understood what the thrust of your question was.
Can you rephrase it very briefly for me?
Okay, well, I'm just saying is, you know, are, you know, such stores or what have you,
are they going to be, you know, is it going to be so hard to find an encryption device that doesn't have the clipper?
Well, I think that's what the government would like to see happen.
And the government is trying to use its own economic power and its regulatory power to make that happen.
Okay, I guess that's it then.
Okay, thanks.
Well, I'd like to touch upon corruption for a moment.
Now, you know, I know it's almost impossible to conceive of this,
but there can be corruption within the government sometimes.
And supposing, just for the sake of argument, not that anything like this could ever happen,
but supposing there was corruption within one of the organizations
or even both of the organizations holding the keys,
could we perhaps see some sort of an illegal sale or passing around of people's keys?
Well, I'll tell you, I have to tell you, the real hazard is a lot more likely than that,
and that's that it doesn't involve the simultaneous corruption of two agencies.
Let's just assume that each escrow agency is perfectly on the up and up and acting in good faith.
Nothing prevents a corrupt law enforcement agent from contriving a false search warrant affidavit,
getting it approved, and then going to the escrow agents and getting the keys.
Yeah, or someone contriving a false law enforcement agency or anything, really.
Right, right. And so that way it doesn't matter.
You know, the escrow agencies don't protect you at all.
Well, you know, I think a good question to ask people,
if they think they should be concerned about the government having this capability,
if the government asked you to mail in a copy of your house keys
or your car keys for your protection, would you do it?
You know, it's something to consider.
I think a lot of people would think twice.
They'd say, wait a minute, this might not be the right thing to do.
The government might have very good reasons.
They might say, look, you know, if you're allowed to keep locks to lock your house up,
that means that when we have to do a search or we have to do an investigation,
we might have to break down the door and warn somebody inside.
And we might, you know, we might put our agents at risk.
So maybe we'll just keep copies of the keys at the police headquarters
and we'll prevent that from happening.
And we won't even look at the keys until we have approval from a neutral magistrate.
Well, it doesn't matter what the procedures are.
There's something that's inherently repugnant about that scenario
because you think the government just shouldn't even be able to demand that of us to begin with.
Yeah, it definitely goes counter to the way I feel about this.
It doesn't feel very reassuring.
Let's give out some information.
First, I'll give out the CPSR information, and then, Mike, you can give out the EFF information.
CPSR has had an electronic petition on the Internet,
and those of you that have access to the Internet might want to participate in this.
All you have to do to put your name onto this petition,
and already I think there are well over 5,000 names in just about a week and a half or so,
you simply email to the following address on the Internet.
The address is clipper, C-L-I-P-P-E-R, dot petition, at sign, C-P-S-R, dot org, O-R-G.
And this is what you have to do.
You can't just send a blank message.
You have to write this particular message in the text.
No quotes.
This is all you write in the message.
No spaces before the words.
Just the words, I oppose Clipper.
I oppose Clipper.
I oppose Clipper.
Just put that on the first line, mail it to Clipper, dot petition, at C-P-S-R, dot org,
and your name will be added.
You'll get a little confirmation message.
So if you don't do it right, you won't get the confirmation message.
So look for that.
And also, if you don't have access to the Internet and you want to get involved with CPSR,
you can call them at 415-322-3778.
Now, Mike, what's EFF doing as far as both electronically and people that don't have access?
If you're on the Internet, what you can do is send a letter to the address Cantwell at EFF.org.
That's C-A-N-T-W-E-L-L at EFF.org.
Letters sent there will be read by Representative Maria Cantwell,
who is sponsoring a bill in Congress that would relax export restrictions
and help create a market for encryption in this country as well.
And in your message, put in the subject line the phrase, somewhere in the subject line,
I want, I support, pardon me, I support H.R. 3627.
3627.
Okay, so the difference then is you would put that message in the subject line as opposed to the...
And in the body of your text, list your reasons.
In other words, we're not soliciting a petition.
We're asking for individual letters from people who are concerned,
who would like to have Congress hear your particular reasons
for wanting to have powerful encryption in this country and wanting a relaxation of export restrictions.
Now, Cantwell is actually going to see these.
That's right.
EFF is printing them out and taking them to Representative Cantwell.
Great.
Is there some kind of a deadline on this?
There is not a deadline, although the sooner the better.
All right.
Now, how can people get a hold of EFF to get more information if they don't have access?
For information about EFF, especially if you want to join,
call us in Washington at area code 202-347-5400
and ask for membership information or ask for information about the Cantwell bill.
Well, Mike, I'm sure we'll be talking in the future about this.
I'm sure this is going to become a very hot topic.
That's right.
Just one final question.
Did this get any media coverage whatsoever?
It did get media coverage in the New York Times,
the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal,
and many other newspapers across the country.
In fact, so far as I know, interestingly enough,
the first newspaper to editorialize against it was, I think, the Trenton Times.
But it did get coverage, but it got it on the weekend,
so a lot of people who don't normally read the newspaper on the weekend didn't see it.
We can anticipate there will be more coverage.
I know that the reporters who are on this beat are very interested in it
and plan to keep with the story.
Okay. One thing people can do, of course, is write to their newspapers
and help spread the word that way.
Mike Irwin, I want to thank you very much for joining us tonight
and for waking people up a little bit.
We'll be in touch in the future.
Okay.
Take care.
And this is Emanuel Goldstein for Off The Hook.
We'll be back again next week from 10 to 11 p.m.
talking about some other aspect of the technological revolution.
Stay tuned. Good night.
Oh, that's understood. One, two, three, go!
Good evening.
In the news tonight, the president's drug strategy.
Is it all it's cracked up to be?
The nation's baby boomers seem to be the hardest hit by cancer.
And in New York, more on the mayor's role in landing a job for his friend Curtis Sliwa.
With these and other stories, I'm Jose Santiago in New York
with Verna Avery-Brown in Washington,
and this is the news for Wednesday, February 9, 1994.
First to Washington for the Pacifica National News.
In the strongest language yet,
NATO ambassadors warned Serb forces around Sarajevo
to lift their siege or face aerial bombing.
In Sarajevo, Serb and Bosnian government leaders
agreed upon a ceasefire.
Paul Hakonos reports from Berlin.
In Brussels today, the 16 NATO countries went a step further
towards authorizing air power to break the stranglehold on Sarajevo.
Although the warning stopped short of an ultimatum,
NATO gave the Bosnian Serbs 10 days to withdraw their heavy weapons
from the hills surrounding the city.
The NATO ambassadors have returned to their home countries
to consult their governments on the details.
Meanwhile, the increased pressure spurred a temporary ceasefire
between Serb and government forces.
Both sides have agreed to put their heavy artillery under UN control
as a prelude to Serb withdrawal.
Theoretically, NATO could order airstrikes at any moment.
Aircraft in Italy and on carriers in the Adriatic
have been ready for over a year to fly on Serb positions.
But there is still reluctance on the part of some countries
to take military action.
They hope that the new bluster will scare the Serbs
into moderating their intransigence.
For Pacifica Network News, this is Paul Hakonos in Berlin.
Bosnia's President Izetbegovic today sent a letter
to the presidents of the U.S. and France
saying the besieged town of Bihac was about to fall.
The president says in the letter that while the world focuses on Sarajevo,
Serb forces are attacking other parts of Bosnia.
Bihac is one of the six predominantly Muslim towns
declared safe areas by the UN Security Council.
According to the Bosnian president,
it has seen fierce fighting for the last three days.
The U.S. today recognized the independence
of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.
The Clinton administration had been avoiding the issue
for fear of offending Macedonia's most immediate neighbor, Greece.
Greece contended that referring to the country as Macedonia
implied it had a claim on the Greek province also called Macedonia.
A White House statement said it recognized the two countries have differences
but hoped they would resolve them through negotiations.
President Clinton today unveiled a strategy
to increase anti-drug spending by a billion dollars.
He was speaking to inmates at a Maryland prison.
This is an issue which must be dealt with person by person, one at a time.
That this is a very human problem
and that it requires those of us who are trying to deal with it
to take certain steps
and those who have already suffered from alcohol or drug abuse
to take even stronger steps.
Clinton says that drug treatment and prevention
are the key to fighting crime.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee today
approved Strobe Talbert to be Deputy Secretary of State.
A move to delay Senate confirmation by two weeks was defeated.
Republican Senator Jesse Helms, who led the effort,
challenged Talbert for writing
that Israel had become a liability to U.S. interests.
Talbert said on Tuesday that his views had changed
but that the essay was critical of Likud government policies then, not Israel.
A federal judge refused a request by Senator Bob Packwood
to halt the transfer of his diaries to the Senate Ethics Committee.
The Ethics Committee is investigating Packwood
on allegations of sexual misconduct, witness intimidation,
and obstruction of the Senate inquiry.
Packwood's lawyer had appealed, saying that the subpoena
violates the senator's Fourth Amendment right of privacy
and Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Federal Judge Thomas Jackson ruled that Packwood had no rights to privacy
and established a 15-day timetable for a transfer of the diaries.
The head of the Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs
has decided to set up an investigation unit
to look into charges of brutality by agency police officers.
Tribal officials have complained that, in the past,
FBI agents nearly always side with BIA officers accused of brutality.
The all-new Internal Affairs Unit will have three to five members
and will be based in Artesia, New Mexico.
And those are the stories topping the news.
[♪upbeat music playing♪
The war on drugs being fought in this country
will get a $13 billion boost next fiscal year.
President Clinton today unveiled his new drug strategy,
claiming he's changing the direction of the program.
Under the measure, drug treatment programs will get more funding
and they'll be less spent on border interdictions.
But critics say the proclaimed change in direction
is not as great as the president claims.
Pacifica's Don Rush reports.
To illustrate his shift towards the human side of fighting drug addiction,
the president announced his program at a Maryland correctional facility.
There, a former inmate and drug addict made a plea
for the kind of treatment programs that the president is pushing in his plan.
43-year-old Joseph Mundo.
I don't want to spend the rest of my life in jail.
I have lost everything and I have to start new.
We addicts inside and outside these walls
need more programs like The Awakening.
The Awakening is the drug program that Mundo entered
and it has finally allowed him to leave prison.
And the president had his own personal moment today.
I have had the questionable privilege of living in a family
that has dealt with both alcoholism and drug abuse.