NSA Spying is Fruition of 20-Year Old Clinton Clipper Chip Proposal

Many people appear shocked that government would spy on electronic communications without a warrant. But a May 1994 article from Government Technology magazine explored the Clinton Administration's Clipper Chip surveillance proposal and the elements of that controversy sound very similar to the current Edward Snowden revelations. The government needed access to private communications to stop terrorists and drug dealers, said Clipper Chip proponents. There should be a back door in all encrypted communications, and the government would never allow unbreakable encryption. Here's the story, 20 years later.

Woodstock of Cyberspace
By Wayne Hanson

A British official, opposing a proposal to enact a freedom of information policy, said “It would encourage ill-informed criticism” of the government. A proponent countered that it would “make the criticism much less ill-informed.” — National Public Radio

From the self-proclaimed “Digital Queers” to the U.S. Department of State, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to the New York Times, the anointed gathered in Chicago for The 1994 Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, described by one participant as "the Woodstock of cyberspace."

There were tie-dyed shirts and funky tennis shoes, three-piece suits, briefcases and backpacks, nose rings and pinky rings. The White House, The FBI, the NSA, the IRS, corporations, lawyers, news media, academics and students from the John Marshall Law School, all with a stake in "Cyberspace Superhighways: Access, Ethics and Control," the title of this year's conference.

During the conference I talked to a janitor from Notre Dame, a physicist from Fermi Labs, A Canadian privacy commissioner, the director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a city employee from Eugene, Ore., a professor from Tulaine University, an executive of IBM, the director of Seattle’s Public Information Network, and many more.

The opening keynote was given by David A. Lytel, information infrastructure specialist for the Executive Office of the President, Office of Science and technology Policy, who had the unenviable task of defending the Clinton Administration’s push to put a back door on all encrypted communications.

Listeners lined up at the CFP’s traditional open mike for a shot at Lytel. Snide, irreverent, irascible and downright nasty, there were impassioned speeches, mean-spirited questions and personal attacks as well as some fine-tuned debate and elegant proposals. It felt like democracy.

Privacy advocates — galvanized by a perceived betrayal of some of their own raised to high station in the Clinton administration — went online and collected 50,000 signatures opposing Clipper. Simon Davies, however, proposed that the "privacy mafia" make a bold move. "Get away from your computer screen," he pontificated (He stood at the lectern dressed as the Pope — nobody said this was a dull conference) "Something as wrong in a free socienty as the Clipper Chip proposal," he said, should result in 5 million signatures rather than 50,000. The problem? Electronic petitions on "the net" are fine, but guess what — to really do the job, you're going to have to beam down out of cyberspace and take on the real world.

As these privacy "away teams" beam down to the real world, they are going to have to meet — some for the first time perhaps — real people. they're going to have to lobby in non-virtual reality in schools, and to what Davies called "mother's clubs."

Davies was introduced as a threat to government, and received applause and cheers. He concluded that privacy could very well die, that we would could become subjects of information slavery, and that unchecked, government, was leading us into a new dark age.

The solution, he proclaimed, was an alliance between privacy advocates and consumer advocates. Privacy is after all, he said, a consumer issue.

Phil Zimmerman concurred in the dark designs of government. Zimmerman — the developer of PGP public-key encryption which could be outlawed if the government gets its way with the Clipper chip — said that the individual once had a chance. Government, he said has changed from a huge slow Brontosaurus “without a fancy nervous system,” into a Tyrannasaurus Rex with computerized reflexes. The mice underfoot don’t have a chance.

Zimmerman said that now is the window of opportunity. Communications in the future will use "encryption we control, or  encryption the government controls."

Zimmerman said it's not hopeless. A recent Time CNN poll revealed that 80 percent of respondents don't want Clipper. Currently, export restrictions and patents are being used by the government, said Zimmerman, to slow the spread of public key encryption like PGP. Give the government its head, he explained, and unbreakable encryption will be outlawed, leaving only the government brand with the government back door.

PGP is now marketed in a legal industrial-strength version by Viacrypt of Phoenix, Ariz
According to presenters at CFP, the need for Clipper is suspect. Most drug or terrorism cases — cited by the government as the basis for Clipper — are broken by informants inside organizations such as the group who bombed the Trade Center in New York. Lytel countered with a list of cases he said were broken by legally obtained wiretaps that would be impossible if criminals used the new unbreakable encryption modes such as PGP.

Nobody likes to see criminals go about their business unhampered. But as in the case of drive-by shooters whose lousy aim kills plenty of innocent bystanders, well-meaning attempts to stop the bad guys can result in plenty of innocently bystanding civil liberties shot full of holes. If Clipper rules, then it may be impossible for citizens to be assured that their communications are secure. It seems that the government should play fair and if they want to tap computer communcations, they should go back to the drawing board and figure out how to break PGP and other public key encryption. That's the American way.

The next step is real-time voice PGP, which Zimmerman is now working on. Will criminals want to use it? probably. Should the government outlaw it? Probably not. The decisions we make now will be with us for a long time. In the information age, where we live, work and play on computer networks, communications will be the core of our society.
The next step, said Zimmerman, is to:

• Pass the Cantwell Bill, which will remove the export restrictions, and allow PGP and other public-key encryption to be exported. This will allow international companies to use it, and will speed its adoption. Foreign governments wouldn’t use American communications equipment if it came with guaranteed access by the U.S. government.

But Zimmerman, himself currently the subject of a grand jury investigation for supposed export violations, has developed something called PGP, for "pretty good protection," a supposedly unbreakable encryptions scheme that is public domain. It went on the Internet, was eagerly grabbed by thousands of Internet users and has become defacto standard, perhaps soon to become an Internet standard.