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Submitted by:
THE NEW AMERICAN -- July 25, 1994
Copyright 1994 -- American Opinion Publishing, Incorporated.
P.O. Box 8040, Appleton, WI 54913 414-749-3784
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ARTICLE: American Opinion
TITLE: "High-Tech Nightmare"
SUBTITLE: "Traveling Big Brother's information superhighway"
AUTHOR: William F. Jasper
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Since its publication in 1949, George Orwell's terrifying novel 1984
has provided a foreboding look at a possible future world in which
both man and machine have become mere instruments to serve the evil
purposes of the totalitarian state. In the book's opening chapter,
through the eyes and mind of protagonist Winston Smith, we gradually
glimpse and feel the suffocating omnipresence of an omnipotent government.
Smith and other tragic inhabitants of his grim world can scarcely look
in any direction without coming under the watchful gaze of the ever-present
visage of the black-mustachioed, Stalinesque Big Brother. Beneath the
ubiquitous posters of the supreme dictator blares the caption: BIG BROTHER
IS WATCHING YOU.
In the grotesque world of Big Brother we see the individual stripped of
all freedom, worth, dignity, and privacy. Technology is harnessed to
penetrate and subjugate every area of their lives, even their dreary,
pathetic homes. This is the chilling description of Smith's apartment:
The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously.
Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very
low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long
as he remained within the field of vision which the metal
plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There
was of course no way of knowing whether you were being
watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system,
the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was
guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched
everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in
your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live,
from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that
every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness,
every movement scrutinized.
Our technological capabilities today are more than adequate to implement
this same kind of Orwellian nightmare, and politically we are headed in
that direction. In the past year the Clinton Administration has been
aggressively pushing a number of statist, privacy-invading initiatives
that have groups and individuals all across the political spectrum screaming
"Big Brother." Clinton proposals for a national identification card, a
national "information super highway," and installation of a federal
"Clipper chip" in our telephones, computers, fax machines, and other
electronic devices to allow government monitoring certainly justify the
concern that we have embarked on the "slippery slope."
It is perfectly apropos, of course, that Bill Clinton's Orwellian statist
programs be introduced with Orwellian "Newspeak," in which words often
mean the opposite of what we normally take them to mean. In 1984 the
Ministry of Truth proclaims, "War Is Peace," "Freedom Is Slavery," and
"Ignorance Is Strength." In like manner, the Clinton Administration seems
to be saying, "Intrusion Is Privacy." With its Clipper chip proposal,
Team Clinton is saying, in effect: "In order to protect your privacy,
Fedgov has to have the ability to invade your privacy -- but you can trust
us not to."
The Clinton pitch is playing to a real and legitimate concern. In this
"information age" our lives are transparent. Our employment history, credit
rating, banking transactions, school and medical records, shopping habits,
travel, telephone and electronic communications, and many other intimate
details of our personal lives are floating in the ether of cyberspace,
available for abuse by government, commercial interests, hackers, personal
enemies, or other interested parties. In order to protect against
unauthorized use of this information, many individuals, companies, and
institutions are making use of data and voice encryption devices and software.
But encryption, says the Administration, threatens legitimate law enforcement
interests, by making it very difficult or impossible for police agencies to
decipher wire taps of dangerous criminal and terrorist elements. The growth
of digital telephone technology and new computer-enhanced efficiency
techniques that allow compressing, hopping, and spreading of telephone
and data transmissions has already made phone tapping extremely hard.
The Administration's solution is to force the private telephone systems
to develop software that will track and decipher transmissions, and to give
the government a monopoly on encryption.
Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh are pushing Congress to enact
requirements that telecommunications providers -- local telephone services,
cellular phone companies, wireless services, long distance networks, etc. --
be able to intercept targeted telephone calls and data transmissions. The
FBI is not proposing to dictate how companies will accomplish these
surveillance tasks; it simply wants to impose a three-year deadline for
companies to come up with methods and technology to do them.
Freeh says that in the digital information age the American people must
be willing to give up a degree of personal privacy in exchange for safety
and security. Moreover, said the FBI head in an interview earlier this
year in which he defended the Clinton Administration's support for the
Digital Telephony and Communications Privacy Improvement Act of 1994,
taxpayers would be asked to pay up to half a billion dollars to develop
the computer software necessary to secure the telecommunications
infrastructure. "The costs are high, but you have to do a cost-benefit
analysis," said Freeh. "The damage to the World Trade tower and the
economic interests of the country are conservatively estimated at
$5 billion," he said, referring to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade
Center in New York. "I think the American people will agree that this
is a credible solution to the problem we face."*
Credible? Hardly. Dangerous? Absolutely. Not only are the Clinton proposals
doomed to failure as effective law enforcement measures against criminals,
but they are threatening precedents that would invite government abuse.
"Do not be fooled," the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an industry lobbying
group, warned on its computer bulletin board. "The FBI scheme would turn the
data superhighway into a national surveillance network of staggering
proportions."
In March, the Digital Privacy and Security Working Group, a coalition of
computer professionals, companies, trade associations, and privacy groups,
wrote a letter to President Clinton, challenging the Administration's
proposed digital telephony bill. "We still see no evidence that current
law enforcement efforts are being jeopardized by new technologies," the
group told the President. "Nor are we convinced that future law enforcement
activities will be jeopardized given industry cooperation." So far, the
Administration and other advocates of the new federal surveillance powers
have not cited any specific cases where criminals have eluded the long
arm of the law due to encryption or failure of telephone carriers to cooperate.
Undaunted, the police statists push onward. Confrontations in Congress
over the Clipper chip are now underway. Hearings on the matter were held
by the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 3rd. The Clipper chip is a product
of the National Security Agency, the super-secret federal spy agency
headquartered at Fort Meade, Maryland. According to Dr. Clinton Brooks,
the NSA scientist who led the Clipper chip research team, the chip project
began in 1989 and cost more than $2.5 million. "Cryptomathematicians" and
other specialists from NSA and the National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST) developed a powerful encryption formula, dubbed Skipjack,
which was built into a microprocessor now known as the Capstone chip, for
use in computers to scramble data. The chip is embedded on a circuit board
known as a Tessera Card and connected to the innards of the computer.
The NSA designers then modified the Capstone chip for telephone encryption
and named the new creation the Clipper chip. The Clipper/Capstone chips
can either be built into the telephones, computers, and fax machines
themselves or put into separate devices about the size of a video cassette
tape which telephones, computers, and fax machines could be plugged into.
In order for the encryption to work, both the caller and the receiver have
to be using equipment with the Capstone/Clipper chips.
As presently proposed by the Administration, the Clipper encryption would
only be activated when two people decide they want to secure their
communications and initiate encryption by pushing a button on their phones
or devices. Their conversation or data transmission would then be scrambled
and rendered meaningless to outsiders by the Clipper chip, since only the
caller and receiver would have the "secret" numerical keys to encode and
decode the transmission.
Except that in the interest of "national security" and "law and order,"
the federal government would hold master keys to each Clipper chip. In
order to protect against government abuse, the master keys would be divided
in half and each half held in "escrow" by different federal agencies.
(The NIST and the Treasury Department have been selected as the custodial
"key escrow" agents.) Before a law enforcement agency could decode a
Clipper-encrypted transmission it would have to present its search warrant
authorizing the wiretap to each custodial agency. Combining the halves of
the key from each "key escrow" custodian, the law enforcement agency could
then decode the call.
Electronic privacy specialist Winn Schwartau writes in his new book,
Information Warfare: Chaos on the Electronic Superhighway, that there are
a number of flaws in this plan:
First, unless everyone uses Clipper, the entire effort is futile.
In order for everyone to use it, it would have to become a mandate
or law, therefore making other forms of encryption illegal. That
will never happen in an open society. Second, for the Clipper to
be accepted, the Government has to be trusted not to abuse their
capabilities to decrypt private transmissions without proper court
authorization, as is required today.
Schwartau notes also that "since no one outside of a select few will be able
to examine the internal workings of the Clipper system, we have to take on
faith that the Government doesn't have a so-called back-door to bypass the
entire escrow system." Considering the trustworthiness of governments
throughout history, it is probably wise in such matters to remain agnostic.
James Bidzos, president of RSA Data Security, a computer security firm, is
one expert who remains skeptical. He sees the Clipper chip as perhaps only
the "visible portion of a large-scale covert operation on U.S. soil by NSA."
John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation is another nonbeliever.
"Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a Peeping
Tom to install your window blinds," said Barlow, in one of the most relevant
and on-target comments concerning the Clipper.
Clintonistas protest that Clipper opponents are getting all worked up over
nothing. "Voluntary, voluntary, voluntary," says Edward A. Roback, one of
NIST's computer specialists. "We're certainly not forcing anyone to use it
[Clipper chip technology]." "Domestically, anybody can use whatever they want,"
Roback insists. "There are no domestic restrictions and, no, the Administration
has no plans to propose any."
Winn Schwartau is not convinced. In Information Warfare he comments:
Perhaps the Government is engaged in a campaign to desensitize
the American public, a sophisticated form of Information Warfare.
First they attempt to pass a law, then they back off when attacked
by privacy advocates and adverse publicity. Next, they make the
very technology available that would have been used to implement
the proposed law, if it had been passed. Then Clipper is announced
and the flak hits the fan, so they back off again. They try to
convince the public that Clipper really is OK. Then maybe they'll
try to sneak it in another law, perhaps in a few months or a year.
See what happens. Sooner or later, the reasoning goes, the public
will cease to care and Clipper will become the law of the land.
It is a scenario that does not take great imagination to conjure.
It depends upon who is behind Clipper, the depth of their pockets,
their political wherewithal, and their motivation and resolve.
Right now it is the federal government that is behind Clipper, and it has
pretty deep pockets. As the largest buyer and user of computer and
telecommunications equipment and services, it is in a good position to
force "voluntary" adoption of its favored technologies and policies.
Defense contractors and other major providers of products and services
to government agencies may soon find themselves forced into the situation
of either adopting Clipper technology or losing government contracts.
"It's starting to look like economic coercion -- use this or else -- even
though the [Clipper] standard is supposed to be voluntary," says David
Peyton, vice president of the Information Technology Association of America.
Daniel Wietzner of the Electronic Frontier Foundation agrees. "The government
is going to use its purchasing power to try and make this a de facto standard,"
he argues.
The only currently available Clipper chip product is the AT&T Surety
Telephone Device 3600, which sells for about $1,200. The federal government
is ordering thousands of them even though it is an unproven commodity.
"The Clipper chip was developed in secrecy," notes Jim Schindler, an
information security manager at Hewlett-Packard, "and everyone begins to
question its strength without peer review."
The Clipper "flunked" its first equivalent of limited peer review. On June
2nd of this year news accounts reported that a computer scientist at AT&T
Bell Laboratories, Dr. Matthew Blaze, had discovered a basic flaw in the
Clipper technology. He didn't break the code; in fact, just the opposite --
he found a weak link in the Clipper chip that would allow users to further
scramble their transmissions so that they couldn't be decoded by the
government even with the use of its escrow keys. If this is the case --
and the NSA has not disputed Dr. Blaze's findings -- the Clipper will be
no more useful for apprehending criminals and terrorists than other
encryption devices and software programs that law enforcement cannot decode.
The NSA has all but conceded that the Clipper flaw exists, but has attempted
to minimize its significance. "Anyone interested in circumventing law-
enforcement access would most likely choose simpler alternatives," the NSA's
director of policy, Michael A. Smith, said in a written statement issued in
response to the Blaze report. "More difficult and time-consuming efforts,
like those discussed in the Blaze paper, are very unlikely to be employed."
This is a very significant and interesting admission. Smith seems to be
conceding that: 1) with sufficient knowledge, resources, and motivation,
criminals could evade Clipper via the Blaze technique; and 2) there are
ways to evade Clipper's surveillance requiring even less knowledge,
resources, and motivation than the Blaze method. Either way, it is the
ostensible targets of Clipper -- criminals and terrorists -- who are most
likely to have the knowledge, resources, and motivation to evade the
technology.
That leaves the average, law-abiding citizen as the logical primary target
of the Clipper. There is a parallel here, of course, with the Clinton drive
for more gun control laws, which (as always) are ignored by the criminal
element and serve only to penalize and criminalize the responsible gun owner.
But the cult of Big Brother is not stopping with surveillance of
telecommunications; Clipper is just the beginning. According to the
computer industry journal PC Week, "The Clinton administration is
working on creating an identification card that every American will
need to interact with any federal government agency." In its May 9th
issue, PC Week reported, "Sources close to the administration said
President Clinton is also considering signing a pair of executive
orders that would facilitate the connection of individuals' bank
accounts and federal records to a government identification card."
According to PC Week, the national ID proposal was presented by the
U.S. Postal Service in April at the Card Tech/ Secure Tech Conference
in Crystal City, Virginia as a "general purpose U.S. services smart
card" to be used by individuals and companies when sending or receiving
electronic mail (E-mail), transferring funds, and interacting with
government agencies.
The computer weekly reported that Postal Service representative Chuck
Chamberlain outlined at the conference "how an individual's U.S. Card
would be automatically connected with the Department of Health and
Human Services, the U.S. Treasury, the IRS, the banking system, and a
central database of digital signatures for authenticating E-mail and
other transactions."
"While the U.S. Card is only a proposal," noted PC Week, "the Postal
Service is prepared to put more than 100 million of the cards in citizens'
pockets within months of administration approval, which could come at
any time," according to Chamberlain.
"There won't be anything you do in business that won't be collected and
analyzed by the government," charges William Murray, a security consultant
to accounting firm Deloitte and Touche in New Canaan, Connecticut, who
attended the Crystal City conference. "This is a better surveillance
mechanism than Orwell or the government could have imagined."
The "smart card" is also a central feature of the Clinton "health care
reform" program. However, some "Friends of Hillary" have even grander
visions. Mary Jane England, MD, a member of the executive committee of
the White House Health Project and president of the Washington Business
Group on Health, a national outfit comprised of some of the nation's
leading corporate welfare statists, is especially excited about the
potential for implanting smart chips in your body. Addressing the 1994
IBM Health Care Executive Conference last March in Palm Springs,
California, Dr. England said:
The Smart Card is a wonderful idea, but even better would be
capacity not to have a card, and I call it "a chip in your ear,
" that would actually access your medical records, so that no
matter where you were, and if you came into an emergency room
unconscious -- and for those of you who treat or know anything
about adolescents, forget the card because they're not going to
have the card when they need it anyway -- [we would have] some
capacity to access that medical record. We need to go beyond the
narrow conceptualization of the Smart Card and really use some
of the technology that's out there. The worst thing we could do
is put in place a technology that's already outdated, because
all of you are in the process of building these systems. Now is
the time to really think ahead....
I don't think that computerized, integrated medical records with
a capacity to access through a chip in your ear is so far off and
I think we need to think of these things.
Considering the Orwellian mind-set of the Clinton regime, the Administration's
fervent campaign for creating a national (federally funded and controlled)
"information network" that will "link every home, business, lab, classroom
and library by the year 2015" becomes positively frightening. This is the
same Administration, remember, that is advocating a huge new National Police
Corps; implementing warrantless searches for firearms; advocating severe
restrictions on firearms ownership by law-abiding citizens; usurping control
of state jurisdiction over law enforcement and criminal justice; and
attempting to purge all religious expressions and symbols from the workplace.
It is the same Administration that wants to take away your right to medical
privacy, but refused to make the records of its own health care task force
public (and even defied a court order to do so). It is the same regime that
(whether through criminal malice or criminal incompetence) wielded its police
powers in such a blatantly tyrannical fashion that it is responsible for the
deaths and incineration of more than 80 members of an arguably harmless
religious sect.
With due respect to Electronic Frontier's Mr. Barlow, trusting this
government to protect your privacy and your rights is more like asking
Jack the Ripper to install the locks on your home.
END OF ARTICLE
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THE NEW AMERICAN -- July 25, 1994
Copyright 1994 -- American Opinion Publishing, Incorporated.
P.O. Box 8040, Appleton, WI 54913
==================================================================