This is the version of my post that went to RISKS 14.64. It was edited by me to
remove assertions which might expose the RISKS digest to libel action.
Permission to redistribute this version as you see fit is explicitly granted.
Please do *not* redistribute the old version.
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From: esr@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond)
To: risks@csl.sri.com
Subject: Re: Clipper (Rotenberg, RISKS-14.62)
In
Denning has to be kidding. The comments on the proposed DSS were uniformly critical. Both Marty Hellman and Ron Rivest questioned the desirability of the proposed standard.
Mr. Rotenberg, as a public figure operating in the political arena, has to
exercise a certain diplomatic restraint in responding to Ms. Denning's claims.
I am, thankfully, under no such requirement.
As a long-time RISKS reader and contributor, I observe that that this is not
the first time that Ms. Denning has apparently operated as a mouthpiece for
the NSA's anti-privacy party line on DES and related issues.
I believe Ms. Denning's remarks must be understood as part of a continuing
propaganda campaign to marginalize and demonize advocates of electronic
privacy rights. Other facets of this campaign have attempted to link privacy
advocates to terrorists and drug dealers by suggesting that only criminals
need fear wiretapping.
These are serious charges. I make them because, in the wake of the Clipper
proposal, I do not believe civil libertarians can afford any longer to assume
that their opponents are persons of good will with whom they can simply debate
minor differences of institutional means in a collegial way.
It's time for someone to say, in public and on this list, what I know many
of us have been thinking. The future is *now*. Electronic privacy issues
are no longer a parlor game for futurologists; they are the focus of a
critical political struggle, *and the opponents of privacy are fighting their
war with all the tools of force, deception, and propaganda they can command*.
The histories of the DES, the FBI wiretap proposal, and now the Clipper
proposal must be considered against a wider background of abuses including
the Steve Jackson case, "Operation Longarm", and the routine tapping of U.S.
domestic telecommunications by NSA interception stations located outside the
geographic borders of the United States.
These form a continuing pattern of attempts by agencies of the U.S. government
to pre-empt efforts to extend First and Fourth Amendment privacy protections
to the new electronic media. In each case, the attempt was made to present
civil libertarians with a fait accompli, invoking "national security" (or the
nastiness of "kiddie porn") to justify legislative, judicial and practical
precedents prejudicial against electronic privacy rights.
While I would not go so far as to claim that these efforts are masterminded by
a unitary conspiracy, I believe that the interlocking groups of spies,
bureaucrats and lawmen who have originated them recognize each other as
cooperating fellow-travellers in much the same way as opposing groups like the
EFF, CPSR and the Cypherpunks do. Their implicit agenda is to make the new
electronic communications media transparent to government surveillance and
(eventually) pliant to government control.
One of the traits of this culture of control is the belief that manipulative
lying and dissemblage can be justified for a `higher good'.
I believe that Ms. Denning's disingenuous claim that the DSS "is now
considered to be just as strong as RSA" is no mere technical misapprehension.
I believe it is propaganda aimed at making objectors non-persons in the
debate. I cannot know whether Ms. Denning actually believes this claim, but
it reminds me all too strongly of the classic "Big Lie" technique.
It is important for us to recognize that the propaganda lie is not an
aberration, but a routine tool of the authoritarian mindset. And the
authoritarian mindset is, ultimately, what we are confronting here --- the
mindset that regards the fighting of elastically-defined `crime' as more
important than privacy, that presumes guilt until innocence is proven, that
demands for government a license to override any individual's natural rights
at political whim.
We cannot trust representatives of an institutional culture that was
*constructed* to deal in information control, lies, secrecy, paranoia and
deception to tell us the truth.
We cannot accept the authoritarians' unverified assurances that the sealed
interior of the Clipper chip contains no `trapdoor' enabling the NSA to
eavesdrop at will.
We cannot trust the authoritarians' assertions that they have no intention of
outlawing cryptographic technologies potentially more secure than the Clipper
chip.
We cannot believe the authoritarians' claims that `independent' key registries
will prevent abuse of decryption keys by government and/or corrupt individuals.
We cannot --- we *must not* --- cede control of encryption technology to
the authoritarians. To do so would betray our children and their descendants,
who will work and *live* in cyberspace to an extent we can barely imagine.
We cannot any longer afford the luxury of treating the authoritarians as honest
dealers with whom compromise is morally advisable, or even possible. Whatever
their own valuation of themselves, the thinly-veiled power grab represented by
the Clipper proposal reveals a desire to institutionalize means which a free
society, wishing to remain free, *cannot tolerate*.
Big Brother must be stopped *here*. *Now.* While it is still possible.
--
Eric S. Raymond