Black Crawling Systems Archive Release 1.0/Black Crawling Systems Archive Release 1.0 (L0pht Heavy Industries, Inc.)(1997).ISO/tezcat/Big_Brother/Inman_on_Clipper.txt

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11/21/94



Admiral Bobby Inman, the former director of the NSA, Deputy directory of

the CIA, and Director of Naval Intelligence spoke at Hal Abelson's MIT

class today about Clipper, export regulations and cryptography.  He was

impressive with respect to the clarity of his points, his even-handedness,

and the precision with which he addressed questions from the class.



He began his talk with the beginnings of the export control debate as

arising with mid-80's. Intelligence from the French disclosed a Soviet

"shopping list" of technologies to acquire from the West, starting with

overt purchases, and moving to covert purchases and theft if necessary.

The US government was particularly alarmed at the size of the figure for

the number of Rubles that the Soviets saved.  The resulting internal

government reaction started by working to reclassify technologies that were

previously public, and then moved restructure the ground rules for business

in order to prevent sensitive technologies from being exported in the

future.



One of those technologies was cryptograpy. Inman said there was a myth in

the press about the value of technical intelligence as not providing

information about intentions, instead providing only information about

configurations and positions.  That's true for imaging technologies, but

communications intelligence (COMINT) does provide information about

intentions.  He said that while he can't provide specific cases, in the

last 20-30 years COMINT has provided significant information about

intentions, including cases where the military was employed.  There were

some cases where they were able to gain access to the transmissions, but

unable to go further because the adversary employed cryptography.



He mentioned that as head of the NSA, he was involved in the decision to

declassify the work related to Magic and it's successes against the

Japanese during WWII.  Even though much of the material was 40 years old

there was govt. resistance to declassification because in many instances

adversaries have employed extremely dated encryption technology, which the

NSA was easily able to crack.  It was felt that in all cases, the less said

about cryptography publicly, the better.



He touched on the mid-70's debate about public cryptography which led to

the establishment of voluntary peer review with a 30-day response from the

NSA.  He felt that this system worked for about 10 years, and finally broke

down when commercial opportunities for cryptography started to arise so

that economic incentives instead of publishing incentives framed the

debate.  (He said something about the extensive, nonpublic, dialogues

between commercial cryptographic companies and the government which

eventually became public.  I didn't quite follow this; he seemed to be

censoring himself as he said it.  Something about both parties or one party

regretting this becomming public.)



The other side of this polarization between public cryptography and

government cryptography was an "evolution of concern" within the

government, driven by public perceptions, about white-collar crime, which

he said was a recent (since Watergate) phenomenon.  Public cryptography

threatens white-collar enforcement, because the FBI has become "totally

dependent" on wiretaps.  When asked later about the proportion of concern

within the government between the various white-collar crimes, such as

drugs, organized crime, terrorism, etc., he replied that the governmental

concern about wiretaps was and is primarily and unambiguously about

narcotics.



The driving concern about public cryptography changed from export to

domestic concerns.  This led to the technological solution, Clipper, which

he termed a mini-disaster.



He said that people inside the government miscalculated the depth of

distrust of government which led to the anti-clipper groundswell.  He felt

that this was simply a "blind spot" in those people; it's not that they

have bad motives, it's just that they can't comprehend why someone wouldn't

trust the government.  By proposing clipper (which is technologically

sound) with it's government-entity escrow, he said that they fed the

spectre of Big Brother, when it would have been better to deal with it from

the start.



One of the ways that they could have dealt with it was via commercial or

nongovernmental escrow, specifically citing the companies in Boston and NY

which deal with stock certificate transactions.  However, he was skeptical

whether nongovernmental escrow had any political future since the initial

blunder.



- From a public policy standpoint, he felt that given the single-issue voting

in the recent election, regarding crime, the public's equivalence of crime

with drugs, and the essential nature of the wiretaps as the sole source of

leads in combatting narcotics, that arguments *to the public* about privacy

would be ineffective.  Most of the public do not see wiretaps as

threatening them.  He felt that if one wanted to fight for privacy in the

public domain, the only chance was to link it with another issue that the

voting public feels strongly about: namely, Big Government, Bureaucracy.



Throughout his talk, this theme was reiterated several times: the public

does makes governmental policy by the way they vote.  The public cares

about crime.  Crime and Drugs are the same thing (in the public eye).

Arguments about privacy will not fly.  The argument must be PACKAGED in

terms that links it to an issue that the public cares about, and the public

cares about and opposes Big Government.



He suggested that the alternatives to government wiretap abilities to

combat drugs might be random uranalysis of the public, specifically to

combat the demand side of the drug trade since enforcement against the

supply side is so terribly unsuccessful.  Note: he wasn't advocating this

action by the government, just pointing out that there are implications to

extreme positions on any issue, largely related to the public's current

concerns.



Back to Narcotics.  He gave the statistic that 90% of the narcotics leads

related to money laundering come from domestic wiretaps.  He claimed that

international wiretaps are less valuable, because of the trail of the money

which generally travels this route:



Small US Bank <1> Large US Bank <2> Canadian Bank <3> Cayman Island <4> Columbia



He claimed that the only valuable link for enforcement is link <1> because

this identifies the individuals subject to law enforcement, while scanning

links <2> and <3> is illegal due to treaty clauses which preclude

surveilance of companies located in friendly-nation intelligence allies

(e.g. Canada) while scanning link <4> is not worthwhile because it's too

far removed and difficult to identify with specific individuals in the US.



When asked about the often rumored "you spy on my citizens, I'll spy on

yours and we'll exchange what we get" cooperation that would allow the US

to subvert restrictions on unauthorized wiretapping of citizens by having,

say Great Britain do it for them, he said that that would be illegal

because of those treaty clauses preventing such spying and it doesn't

happen; he claimed that the intelligence sharing that goes on is motiviated

by cost considerations, rather than trying to subvert laws in the form that

this rumor alleges.



He suggested that most companies are not willing to spend money on strong

cryptography and that in order to get companies more interested in strong

cryptography, there must be one or two well-publicized cases where

companies experience actual losses due to some sort of ether-sniffing.



Inman made the point that when governments are faced with problems that are

too big, they often just throw up their hands and don't deal with it.

Someone else in the class followed on this by pointing out that the logical

implication of that argument is that redoubling efforts for the adoption of

PGP or the like would effectively make the problem a big one for the

government.



Inman was surprised by the looming introduction of VoicePGP, and said that

that would be a big problem, particularly with the advent of mobile

computers that supported VoicePGP, since much of the dealer-level narcotics

enfocement relies on such surveilance.  He pointed out, though, that

current cellular phones are difficult to monitor because "there's no

technology that can sweep up and sort out phone conversations" despite very

large investments in this.  He drew an analogy to a case where he had to

inform President Carter that an insecure dedicated private land-line to the

British Prime Minister had been compromised. Inman told Carter that the

nature of the public phone system, with its huge volume and unpredictable

switching, would have made using a pay phone more secure.



Inman, when asked about foreign export restrictions felt that the best way

to remain ahead technologically was not to restrict export, but speed the

pace at which you advance domestically.  The current global economic system

is very different from the days when export constraints were first

proposed, and that they're probably not applicable.



Many of you might remember the controversial hearings regarding Clinton's

nomination of Inman for DCI about a year ago; it was rumored in the press

that William Saffire of the New York Times and Senator Dole had worked out

a pact, whereby Dole would sink Inman if Saffire would sink Clinton.  This

rumor was never substantiated, but Saffire's scathing editorial about Inman

stemming from an incident in which he felt that Inman has lied to him

helped scuttle Inman's nomination.



Today, Inman mentioned that his privacy had been invaded during the

nomination process; when asked for elaboration, he cited cases of the press

going around asking questions about his wife and sons.  So Inman seems

sensitive to issues of privacy, but in this case, they seem to be primarily

associated with invasions of privacy by the media rather than by the

government.



In all, Inman gave a balanced talk, concerned primarily with clarifying the

motives of the different players (the govt and the public) to make some

sense of complicated issues.





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