BBS in a Box 2/BBS in a box - Trilogy II.iso/Files/Mag/D-G/Electronic Frontier/Puzzle Palace

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                   Decrypting the Puzzle Palace
                               by
                      John Perry Barlow



                  "A little sunlight is the best disinfectant.
                                      --Justice Louis Brandeis


Over a year ago, in a condition of giddier innocence than I enjoy
today, I wrote the following about the discovery of Cyberspace:

"Imagine discovering a continent so vast that it may have no other
side. Imagine a new world with more resources than all our future
greed might exhaust, more opportunities than there will ever be
entrepreneurs enough to exploit, and a peculiar kind of real estate
which expands with development."

One less felicitous feature of this terrain which I hadn't noticed
then is what seems to be a long-encamped and immense army of
occupation.

This army represents interests which are difficult to define, guards
the area against unidentified enemies, meticulously observes almost
every activity undertaken there, and continuously prevents most who
inhabit its domain from drawing any blinds against such observation.

It marshals at least 40,000 troops, owns the most advanced computing
resources in the world, and uses funds the dispersal of which does
not fall under any democratic review.

Imagining this force won't require from you the inventive powers of a
William Gibson. The American Occupation Army of Cyberspace exists.
Its name is the National Security Agency.

It may be argued that this peculiar institution inhibits free trade,
has directly damaged American competitiveness, and poses a threat to
liberty anywhere people communicate with electrons. It's principal
function, as miff colleague John Gilmore puts it, is "wire-tapping
the world," which it is free to do without a warrant from any judge.

It is legally constrained from domestic surveillance, but precious
few people are in a good position to watch what, how, or whom the NSA
watches. And those who are tend to be temperamentally sympathetic to
its objectives and methods. They like power, and power understands
the importance of keeping it own secrets and learning everyone
else's.

Whether it is meticulously ignoring every American byte or not, the
NSA is certainly pursuing policies which will render our domestic
affairs transparent to anyone who can afford big digital hardware.
Such policies could have profound consequences on our liberty and
privacy.

More to point, the role of the NSA in the area of domestic privacy
needs to be assessed in the light of other recent federal initiatives
which seem directly aimed at permanently denying privacy to the
inhabitants of Cyberspace, whether foreign or American.

Finally it seems a highly opportune time, directly following our
disorienting victory in the Cold War, to ask if the threats from
which the NSA purportedly protects us from are as significant as the
hazards its activities present.

Like most Americans I'd never given much thought to the NSA until
recently. (Indeed its very existence was a secret for much of my
life. Beltway types used to joke that NSA stood for "No Such
Agency.")

I vaguely knew that it was another of the 12 or so shadowy federal
spook houses which were erected shortly after the Iron Curtain with
the purpose of stopping its further advance. It derives entirely from
a memorandum sent by Harry Truman on October 24, 1952 to Secretary of
State Dean Acheson and Defense Secretary Robert Lovatt. This memo,
the official secrecy of which remained unpenetrated for almost 40
years, created the NSA, placed it under the authority of the
Secretary of Defense, and charged it with monitoring and decoding any
signal transmission relevant to the security of the United States.

Even after I started noticing the NSA, my natural immunity to
paranoia combined with a general belief in the incompetence of all
bureaucracies...especially those whose inefficiencies are unmolested
by public scrutiny...to mute any sense of alarm. But this was before
I began to understand the subterranean battles raging over data
encryption and the NSA's role in them. Lately, I'm less sanguine.

Encryption may be the only reliable method for conveying privacy to
the inherently public domain of Cyberspace. I certainly trust it more
than privacy protection laws. Relying on government to protect your
privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.

In fact, we already have a strong-sounding federal law protecting our
electronic privacy, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act or
ECPA. But this law has not particular effective in those areas were
electronic eavesdropping is technically easy. This is especially true
in the area of cellular phone conversations, which, under the current
analog transmission standard, are easily accessible to anyone from
the FBI to you.

The degree of law enforcement apprehension over secure cellular
encryption provides mute evidence of how seriously they've been
taking ECPA. They are moving on a variety of fronts to see that
robust electronic privacy protection systems don't become generally
available to the public. Indeed, the current administration may be so
determined to achieve this end that they may be willing to paralyze
progress in America's most promising technologies rather than yield
on it.

Push is coming to shove in two areas of communications technology:
digital transmission of heretofore analog signals and the encryption
of transmitted data.

As the communications service providers move to packet switching,
fiber optic transmission lines, digital wireless, ISDN and other
advanced techniques, what have been discrete channels of continuous
electrical impulses, voices audible to anyone with alligator clips on
the right wires, are now becoming chaotic blasts of data packets,
readily intelligible only to the sender and receiver. This
development effectively forecloses traditional wire-tapping
techniques, even as it provides new and different opportunities for
electronic surveillance.

It is in the latter area where the NSA knows its stuff. A fair
percentage of the digital signals dispatched on planet Earth must
pass at some point through the NSA's big sieve in Fort Meade,
Maryland, 12 underground acres of the heaviest hardware in the
computing world. There, unless these packets are also encrypted with
a particularly knotty algorithm, sorting them back into their
original continuity is not so difficult.

Last spring, alarmed at a future in which it would have to sort
through an endless fruit salad of encrypted bits, the FBI persuaded
Senator Joseph Biden to include language in Senate Bill 266 which
would have directed providers of electronic communications services
and devices (such as digital cellular phone systems or other
multiplexed communications channels) to implement only such
encryption methods as would assure governmental ability to extract
from the data stream the plain text of any voice or data
communications in which it took a legal interest. It was if the
government had responded to a technological leap in lock design by
requiring building contractors to supply it with skeleton keys to
every door in America.

The provision raised wide-spread concern in the computer community,
which was better equipped to understand its implications than the
general public, and in August of last year, the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, in cooperation with Computer Professionals for Social
Responsibility and other industry groups, successfully lobbied to
have it removed from the bill.

Our celebration was restrained. We knew we hadn't seen the last of
it. For one thing, the movement to digital communications does create
some serious obstacles to traditional wire-tapping procedures. I
fully expected that law enforcement would be back with new proposals,
which I hoped might be ones we could support. But what I didn't
understand then, and am only now beginning to appreciate, was the
extent to which this issue had already been engaged by the NSA in the
obscure area of export controls over data encryption algorithms.

Encryption algorithms, despite their purely defensive
characteristics, have been regarded by the government of this country
as weapons of war for many years. If they are to be employed for
privacy (as opposed to authentication) and they are any good at all,
their export is licensed under State Department's International
Traffic in Arms Regulations or ITAR.

The encryption watchdog is the NSA. It has been enforcing a policy,
neither debated nor even admitted to, which holds that if a device or
program contains an encryption scheme which the NSA can't break
fairly easily, it will not be licensed for international sale.

Aside for marveling at the silliness of trying to embargo algorithms,
a practice about as practicable as restricting the export of wind, I
didn't pay much attention to the implications of NSA encryption
policies until February of this year.  It was then that I learned
about the deliberations of an obscure group of cellular industry
representatives called the Ad Hoc Authentication Task Force, TR45.3
and of the influence which the NSA has apparently exercised over
their findings.

In the stately fashion characteristic of standard-setting bodies,
this group has been working for several years on a standard for
digital cellular transmission, authentication, and privacy protection
to be known by the characteristically whimsical telco moniker IS-54B.

In February they met near Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, NJ. At
that meeting, they recommended, and agreed not to publish, an
encryption scheme for American-made digital cellular systems which
many sophisticated observers believe to be intentionally vulnerable.
It was further thought by many observers that this "dumbing down" had
been done indirect cooperation with the NSA.

Given the secret nature of the new algorithm, its actual merits were
difficult to assess. But many cryptologists believe there is enough
in the published portions of the standard to confirm that it isn't
any good.

One cryptographic expert, one of two I spoke with who asked not to be
identified lest the NSA take reprisals against his company, said:

"The voice privacy scheme , as opposed to the authentication scheme,
is pitifully easy to break. It involves the generation of two "voice
privacy masks" each 260 bits long. They are generated as a byproduct
of the authentication algorithm and remain fixed for the duration of
a call. The voice privacy masks are exclusive_ORed with each frame of
data from the vocoder at the transmitter. The receiver XORs the same
mask with the incoming data frame to recover the original plain text.
Anyone familiar with the fundamentals of cryptanalysis can easily see
how weak this scheme is."

And indeed, Whitfield Diffie, co-inventor of Public Key cryptography
and arguably the dean of this obscure field, told me this about the
fixed masks:

"Given that description of the encryption process, there is no need
for the opponents to know how the masks were generated. Routine
cryptanalytic operations will quickly determine the masks and remove
them.''

Some on committee claimed that possible NSA refusal of export
licensing had no bearing on the algorithm they chose. But their
decision not to publish the entire method and expose it to
cryptanalytical abuse (not to mention ANSI certification) was
accompanied by the following convoluted justification:

"It is the belief of the majority of the Ad Hoc Group, based on our
current understanding of the export requirements, that a published
algorithm would facilitate the cracking of the algorithm to the
extent that its fundamental purpose is defeated or
compromised."(Italics added.)

Now this is a weird paragraph any way you parse it, but its most
singular quality is the sudden, incongruous appearance of export
requirements in a paragraph otherwise devoted to algorithmic
integrity. In fact, this paragraph is itself code, the plain text of
which goes something like this: "We're adopting this algorithm
because, if we don't, the NSA will slam an export embargo on all
domestically manufactured digital cellular phones."

Obviously, the cellular phone systems manufacturers and providers are
not going to produce one model for overseas sale and another for
domestic production. Thus, a primary effect of NSA-driven efforts to
deny some unnamed foreign enemy secure cellular communications is on
domestic security. The wireless channels available to private
Americans will be cloaked in a mathematical veil so thin that, as one
crypto-expert put it, "Any county sheriff with the right PC-based
black box will be able to monitor your cellular conversations."

When I heard him say that, it suddenly became clear to me that,
whether consciously undertaken with that goal or not, the most
important result of the NSA's encryption embargoes has been the
future convenience of domestic law enforcement. Thanks to NSA export
policies, they will be assured that, as more Americans protect their
privacy with encryption, it will be of a sort easily penetrated by
authority.

I find it increasingly hard to imagine this is not their real
objective as well. Surely, they must be aware of how ineffectual
their efforts have been in keeping good encryption out of inimical
military possession. An algorithm is somewhat less easily stopped at
the border than, say, a nuclear reactor. As William Neukom, head of
Microsoft Legal puts it, "The notion that you can control this
technology is comical."

I became further persuaded that this was the case upon hearing, from
a couple of sources, that the Russians have been using the possibly
uncrackable (and American) RSA algorithm in their missile launch
codes for the last ten years and that, for as little as five bucks,
one can get a software package called Crypto II on the streets of
Saint Petersburg which includes both RSA and DES encryption systems.

Nevertheless, the NSA has been willing to cost American business a
lot of revenue rather than allow domestic products with strong
encryption into the global market.

While it's impossible to set a credible figure on what that loss
might add up to, it's high. Jim Bidzos, whose RSA Data Security
licenses RSA, points to one major Swiss bid in which a hundred
million dollar contract for financial computer terminals went to a
European vendor after American companies were prohibited by the NSA
from exporting a truly secure network.

The list of export software containing intentionally broken
encryption is also long. Lotus Notes ships in two versions. Don't
count on much protection from the encryption in the export version.
Both Microsoft and Novell have been thwarted in their efforts to
include RSA in their international networking software, despite
frequent publication of the entire RSA algorithm in technical
publications all over the world.

With hardware, the job has been easier. NSA levied against the
inclusion of a DES  chip in the AS/390 series IBM mainframes in late
1990 despite the fact that, by this time, DES was in widespread use
around the world, including semi-official adoption by our official
enemy, the USSR.

I now realize that Soviets have not been the NSA's main concern at
any time lately. Naively hoping that, with the collapse of the Evil
Empire, the NSA might be out of work, I then learned that, given
their own vigorous crypto systems and their long use of some
embargoed products, the Russians could not have been the threat from
whom this forbidden knowledge was to be kept. Who has the enemy been
then? I started to ask around.

Cited again and again as the real object of the embargoes were Third-
World countries. terrorists and... criminals. Criminals, most
generally drug-flavored, kept coming up, and nobody seemed terribly
concerned that some of their operations might be located in areas
supposedly off-limits to NSA scrutiny.

Presumably the NSA is restricted from conducting American
surveillance by both the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of
1978(FISA) and a series of presidential directives, beginning with
one issued by President Ford following Richard Nixon's bold  misuse
of the NSA, in which he explicitly directed the NSA to conduct
widespread domestic surveillance of political dissidents and drug
users.

But whether or not FISA has actually limited the NSA's abilities to
conduct domestic surveillance seemed less relevant the more I thought
about it. A better question to ask was, "Who is best served by the
NSA's encryption export policies?" The answer is clear: domestic law
enforcement. Was this the result of some spook plot between NSA and,
say, the Department of Justice? Not necessarily.

Certainly in the case of the digital cellular standard, cultural
congruity between foreign intelligence, domestic law enforcement, and
what somebody referred to as "spook wannabes on the TR45.3 committee"
might have a lot more to do with the its eventual flavor than any
actual whisperings along the Potomac.

Unable to get anyone presently employed by the NSA to comment on this
or any other matter and with little opportunity to assess the NSA's
congeniality toward domestic law enforcement from the inside, I
approached a couple of old hands for a highly distilled sample of
intelligence culture.

I called Admirals Stansfield Turner and Bobby Ray Inman. Not only had
their Carter administration positions as, respectively, CIA and NSA
Directors, endowed them with considerable experience in such matters,
both are generally regarded to be somewhat more sensitive to the
limits of democratic power than their successors. None of whom seemed
likely to return my calls anyway.

My phone conversations with Turner and Inman were amiable enough, but
they didn't ease my gathering sense that the NSA takes an active
interest in areas which are supposedly beyond its authorized field of
scrutiny.

Turner started out by saying he was in no position to confirm or deny
any suspicions about direct NSA-FBI cooperation on encryption, but he
didn't think I was being exactly irrational in raising the question.
In fact, he genially encouraged me to investigate the matter further.

He also said that while a sub rosa arrangement between the NSA and
the Department of Justice to compromise domestic encryption would be
"injudicious," he could think of no law, including FISA (which he
helped design), which would prevent it.

Most alarmingly, this gentleman who has written eloquently on the
hazards of surveillance in a democracy did not seem terribly
concerned that our digital shelters are being rendered permanently
translucent by and to the government.

He said, "A threat could develop...terrorism, narcotics,
whatever...where the public would be pleased that all electronic
traffic was open to decryption. You can't legislate something which
forecloses the possibility of meeting that kind of emergency."

Admiral Inman had even more enthusiasm for assertive governmental
supervision. Although he admitted no real knowledge of the events
behind the new cellular encryption standard, he wasn't the least
disturbed to hear that it might be flawed.

And, despite the fact that his responsibilities as NSA Director had
been restricted to foreign intelligence, he seemed a lot more
comfortable talking about threats on the home front.

"The Department of Justice," he began, "has a very legitimate worry.
The major weapon against white collar crime has been the court-
ordered wiretap. If the criminal elements go to using a high quality
cipher, the principal defense against narcotics traffic is gone."
This didn't sound like a guy who, were he still head of NSA, would
rebuff FBI attempts to get a little help from his agency.

He brushed off my concerns about the weakness of the cellular
encryption standard. "If all you're seeking is personal privacy, you
can get that with a very minimal amount of encipherment."

Well, I wondered, Privacy from whom?

And he seemed to regard real, virile encryption to be something
rather like a Saturday Night Special.  "My answer," he said, "would
be legislation which would make it a criminal offense to use
encrypted communication to conceal criminal activity."

Wouldn't that render all encrypted traffic automatically suspect? I
asked.

"Well, he said, "you could have a registry of institutions which can
legally use ciphers. If you get somebody using one who isn't
registered, then you go after him."

You can have my encryption algorithm, I thought to myself, when you
pry my cold dead fingers from its private key.

It wasn't a big sample, but it was enough to gain a better
appreciation of the cultural climate of the intelligence community.
And these guys are the liberals. What legal efficiencies might their
Republican successors be willing to employ to protect the American
Way?

Without the comfortably familiar presence of the Soviets to hate and
fear, we can expect to see a sharp increase in over-rated bogeymen
and virtual states of emergency. This is already well under way. I
think we can expect our drifting and confused hardliners to burn the
Reichstag repeatedly until they have managed to extract from our
induced alarm the sort of government which makes them feel safe.

This process has been under way for some time. One sees it in the war
on terrorism, against which pursuit "no liberty is absolute," as
Admiral Turner put it. This, despite the fact that, during last year
for which I have a solid figure, 1987, only 7 Americans succumbed to
terrorism.

You can also see it clearly under way in the War on Some Drugs. The
Fourth Amendment to the Constitution has largely disappeared in this
civil war. And among the people I spoke with, it seemed a common
canon that drugs (by which one does not mean Jim Beam, Marlboros,
Folger's, or Halcion) were a sufficient evil to merit the
government's holding any more keys it felt the need for.

One individual close to the committee said that at least some of the
aforementioned "spook wannabes" on the committee  were "interested in
weak cellular encryption because they considered warrants not to be
"practical" when it came to pursuing drug dealers and other criminals
using cellular phones."

In a miscellaneously fearful America, where the people cry for
shorter chains and smaller cages, such privileges as secure personal
communications are increasingly regarded as expendable luxuries. As
Whitfield Diffie put it, "From the consistent way in which Americans
seem to put security ahead of freedom, I rather fear that most of
them would prefer that all electronic traffic was open to government
decryption right now if they had given it any thought."

In any event, while I found no proof of an NSA-FBI  conspiracy to gut
the American cellular phone encryption standard, it seemed clear to
me that none was needed. The same results can be delivered by a
cultural "auto-conspiracy" between like-minded hardliners and
cellular companies who will care about privacy only when their
customers do.

You don't have to be a hand-wringing libertarian like me to worry
about the domestic consequences of the NSA's encryption embargoes.
They are also, as stated previously, bad for business, unless, of
course, the business of America is no longer business but, as
sometimes seems the case these days, crime control.

As Ron Rivest (the "R" in RSA) said to me, "We have the largest
information based economy in the world. We have lots of reasons for
wanting to protect information, and weakening our encryption systems
for the convenience of law enforcement doesn't serve the national
interest."

But by early March, it had become clear that this supposedly
business-oriented administration had made a clear choice to favor
cops over commerce even if the costs to the American economy were to
become extremely high.

A sense of White House seriousness in this regard could be taken from
their response to the first serious effort by Congress to bring the
NSA to task for its encryption embargoes. Rep. Mel Levine (D-Calif.)
proposed an amendment to the Export Administration Act to transfer
mass market software controls to the Commerce Department, which would
relax the rules. The administration responded by saying that they
would veto the entire bill if the Levine amendment remained attached
to it.

Even though it appeared the NSA had little to fear from Congress, the
Levine amendment may have been part of what placed the agency in a
bargaining mood for the first time. They entered into discussions
with the Software Publishers Association who, acting primarily on
behalf of Microsoft and Lotus, got to them to agree "in principle" to
a streamlined process for export licensing of encryption which might
provide for more robust standards than have been allowed previously.

But the negotiations between the NSA and the SPA were being conducted
behind closed doors, with the NSA-imposed understanding that any
agreement they reached would be set forth only in a "confidential"
letter to Congress. As in the case of the digital cellular standard,
this would eliminate the public scrutiny by cryptography researchers
which anneals genuinely hardened encryption.

Furthermore, some cryptographers worried that the encryption key
lengths to which the SPA appeared willing to restrict its member
publishers might be too short to provide much defense against the
sorts of brute-force decryption assaults which advances in processor
technology will yield in the fairly near future. And brute force has
always been the NSA's strong suit.

Whether accurate or not, the impression engendered by the style of
the NSA-SPA negotiations was not one of unassailable confidence. The
lack of it will operate to the continued advantage of foreign
manufacturers in an era when more and more institutions are going to
be concerned about the privacy of their digital communications.

But the economic damage which the NSA-SPA agreement might cause would
be minor compared to what would result from a startling new federal
initiative, the Department of Justice's proposed legislation on
digital telephony. If you're wondering what happened to the snooping
provisions which were in Senate Bill 266, look no further. They're
back. And they're bigger and bolder than ever.

They are contained in a sweeping proposal which have been made by the
Justice Department to the Senate Commerce Committee for legislation
which would "require providers of electronic communications services
and private branch exchanges to  ensure that the Government's ability
to lawfully intercept  communications is unimpeded by the
introduction of advanced digital  telecommunications technology or
any other telecommunications technology."

Amazingly enough, this really means what it says: before any advance
in telecommunications technology can be deployed, the service
providers and manufacturers must assure the cops that they can tap
into it. In other words, development in digital communications
technology must come to a screeching halt until Justice can be
assured that it will be able to grab  and examine data packets with
the same facility they have long enjoyed with analog wire-tapping.

It gets worse. The initiative also provides that, if requested by the
Attorney General, "any Commission proceeding concerning regulations,
standards or registrations issued or to be issued under  authority of
this section shall be closed to the public." This essentially places
the Attorney General in a position to shut down any
telecommunications advance without benefit of public hearing.

When I first heard of the digital telephony proposal, I assumed it
was a kind of bargaining chip. I couldn't imagine it was serious. But
it now appears they are going to the mattresses on this one.

Taken together with NSA's continued assertion of its authority over
encryption, a pattern becomes clear. The government of the United
States is so determined to maintain law enforcement's traditional
wire-tapping abilities in the digital age that it is willing to
fundamentally cripple the American economy to do so. This may sound
hyperbolic, but I believe it is not.

The greatest technology advantage this country presently enjoys is in
the areas of software and telecommunications. Furthermore, thanks in
large part to the Internet, much of America is already wired for
bytes, as significant an economic edge in the Information Age as the
existence of a railroad system was for England one hundred fifty
years ago.

If we continue to permit the NSA to cripple our software and further
convey to the Department of Justice the right to stop development the
Net without public input, we are sacrificing both our economic future
and our liberties. And all in the name of combating terrorism and
drugs.

This has now gone far enough. I have always been inclined to view the
American government as pretty benign as such creatures go. I am
generally the least paranoid person I know, but there is something
scary about a government which cares more about putting its nose in
your business than it does about keeping that  business healthy.

As I write this, a new ad hoc working group on digital privacy,
coordinated by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is scrambling to
meet the challenge. The group includes representatives from
organizations like AT&T, the Regional Bells, IBM, Microsoft, the
Electronic Mail Association and about thirty other companies and
public interest groups.

Under the direction of Jerry Berman, EFF's Washington office
director, and John Podesta, a capable lobbyist and privacy specialist
who helped draft the ECPA, this group intends to stop the provisions
in digital telephony proposal from entering the statute books.

We also intend to work with federal law enforcement officials to
address their legitimate concerns. We don't dispute their need to
conduct some electronic surveillance, but we believe this can be
assured by more restrained methods than they're proposing.

We are also preparing a thorough examination of the NSA's encryption
export policies and looking into the constitutional implications of
those policies. Rather than negotiating behind closed doors, as the
SPA has been attempting to do, America's digital industries have a
strong self-interest in banding together to bring the NSA's
procedures and objectives into the sunlight of public discussion.

Finally, we are hoping to open a dialog with the NSA. We need to
develop a better understanding of their perception of the world and
its threats. Who are they guarding us against and how does encryption
fit into that endeavor? Despite our opposition to their policies on
encryption export, we assume that NSA operations have some merit. But
we would like to be able to rationally balance the merits against the
costs.

We strongly encourage any organization which might have a stake in
the future of digital communication to become involved. Letters
expressing your concern may be addressed to: Sen. Ernest Hollings,
Chairman, Senate Commerce Committee, U.S. Senate, Washington, DC and
to Don Edwards, Chairman, Subcommitee on Constitutional Rights, House
Judiciary Committee. (I would appreciate hearing those concerns
myself. Feel free to copy me with those letters at my physical
address, c/o P.O. Box 1009, Pinedale, WY  82941 or in Cyberspace,
[e-mail].)

If your organization is interested in becoming part of the digital
privacy working group, please contact EFF at: 1001 G Street, NW, Suite 950 East,
Washington, DC  20001, 202/347-5400, FAX: [phone].
 EFF also encourages individuals interested
in these issues to join the organization. Contact us at: the address above or at,
[e-mail].

The legal right to express oneself is meaningless if there is no
secure medium through which that expression may travel. By the same
token, the right to hold certain unpopular opinions is forfeit unless
one can discuss those opinions with others of like mind without the
government listening in.

Even if you trust the current American government, as I am still
largely inclined to, there is a kind of corrupting power in the
ability to create public policy in secret while assuring that the
public will have little secrecy of its own.

In its secrecy and technological might, the NSA already occupies a
very powerful position. And conveying to the Department of Justice
what amounts to licensing authority for all communications technology
would give it a control of information distribution rarely asserted
over English-speaking people since Oliver Cromwell's Star Chamber
Proceedings.

Are there threats, foreign or domestic, which are sufficiently grave
to merit the conveyance of such vast legal and technological might?
And even if the NSA and FBI may be trusted with such power today,
will they always be trustworthy? Will we be able to do anything about
it if they aren't?

Senator Frank Church said of NSA technology in 1975 words which are
more urgent today:

"That capability at any time could be turned around on the American
people and no American would have any privacy left. There would be no
place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, the
technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the
government could enable it to impose total tyranny. There would be no
way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine
together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it
was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the
capacity of this technology."

San Francisco, California
May, 1992

Reprinted from Communications of the ACM, June 1992
by permission of the author