                     (An Internet Libernet Reprint)
                       Jackboots on the Infobahn
                          By John Perry Barlow
        
        
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        Date: Wed, 16 Feb 94 14:20:40 -0800
        From: Michael Burgett <burgett@emigre.mv.us.adobe.com>
        Subject: Wired article...
        To: libernet@Dartmouth.EDU
        
        Pssst.... pass the word....
        
        Mike
        
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                    Copyright 1993,4 Wired USA Ltd.
                          All Rights Reserved
               For complete copyright information, please
                        see the end of this file
        
                               WIRED 2.04
                             Electrosphere
                             *************
        
                       Jackboots on the Infobahn
                       ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
        
         Clipper is a last ditch attempt by the United States,
          the last great power from the old Industrial Era, to
              establish imperial control over cyberspace.
        
                          By John Perry Barlow
        
        
        [Note: The following article will appear in the April
        1994 issue of WIRED. We, the editors of WIRED, are net-
        casting it now in its pre-published form as a public
        service. Because of the vital and urgent nature of its
        message, we believe readers on the Net should hear and
        take action now. You are free to pass this article on
        electronically; in fact we urge you to replicate it
        throughout the net with our blessings. If you do,
        please keep the copyright statements and this note
        intact. For a complete listing of Clipper-related
        resources available through WIRED Online, send email to
        <infobot@wired.com> with the following message: "send
        clipper.index". - The Editors of WIRED]
        
        On January 11, I managed to schmooze myself aboard Air
        Force 2. It was flying out of LA, where its principal
        passenger had just outlined his vision of the
        information superhighway to a suited mob of television,
        show-biz, and cable types who  fervently hoped to own
        it one day - if they could ever figure out what the
        hell it was.
        
        >From the standpoint of the Electronic Frontier
        Foundation the speech had been wildly encouraging. The
        administration's program, as announced by Vice
        President Al Gore, incorporated many of the concepts of
        open competition, universal access, and  deregulated
        common carriage that we'd been pushing for the previous
        year.
        
        But he had said nothing about the future of privacy,
        except to cite among the bounties of the NII its
        ability to "help law enforcement agencies thwart
        criminals and terrorists who might use advanced
        telecommunications to commit crimes."
        
        On the plane I asked Gore what this implied about
        administration policy on cryptography. He became as
        noncommittal as a cigar-store Indian. "We'll be making
        some announcements.... I can't tell you anything more."
        He hurried to the front of the  plane, leaving me to
        troubled speculation.
        
        Despite its fundamental role in assuring privacy,
        transaction security, and reliable identity within the
        NII, the Clinton administration has not demonstrated an
        enlightenment about cryptography up to par with the
        rest of its digital vision.
        
        The Clipper Chip - which threatens to be either the
        goofiest waste of federal dollars since President
        Gerald Ford's great Swine Flu program or, if actually
        deployed, a surveillance technology of profound
        malignancy - seemed at first an ugly legacy  of the
        Reagan-Bush modus operandi. "This is going to be our
        Bay of Pigs," one Clinton White House official told me
        at the time Clipper was introduced, referring to the
        disastrous plan to invade Cuba that Kennedy inherited
        from Eisenhower.
        
        (Clipper, in case you're just tuning in, is an
        encryption chip that the National Security Agency and
        FBI hope will someday be in every phone and computer in
        America. It scrambles your communications, making them
        unintelligible to all but their  intended recipients.
        All, that is, but the government, which would hold the
        "key" to your chip. The key would separated into two
        pieces, held in escrow, and joined with the appropriate
        "legal authority.")
        
        Of course, trusting the government with your privacy is
        like having a Peeping Tom install your window blinds.
        And, since the folks I've met in this White House seem
        like extremely smart, conscious freedom-lovers - hell,
        a lot of them are Deadheads -  I was sure that after
        they were fully moved in, they'd face down the National
        Security Agency and the FBI, let Clipper die a natural
        death, and lower the export embargo on reliable
        encryption products.
        
        Furthermore, the National Institutes of Standards and
        Technology and the National Security Council have been
        studying both Clipper and export embargoes since April.
        Given that the volumes of expert testimony they had
        collected overwhelmingly opposed  both, I expected the
        final report would give the administration all the
        support it needed to do the right thing.
        
        I was wrong. Instead, there would be no report.
        Apparently, they couldn't draft one that supported, on
        the evidence, what they had decided to do instead.
        
        
                          THE OTHER SHOE DROPS
        
        On Friday, February 4, the other jackboot dropped. A
        series of announcements from the administration made it
        clear that cryptography would become their very own
        "Bosnia of telecommunications" (as one staffer put it).
        It wasn't just that the old  Serbs in the National
        Security Agency and the FBI were still making the
        calls. The alarming new reality was that the
        invertebrates in the White House were only too happy to
        abide by them. Anything to avoid appearing soft on
        drugs or terrorism.
        
        So, rather than ditching Clipper, they declared it a
        Federal Data Processing Standard, backing that up with
        an immediate government order for 50,000 Clipper
        devices. They appointed the National Institutes of
        Standards and Technology and the  Department of
        Treasury as the "trusted" third parties that would hold
        the Clipper key pairs. (Treasury, by the way, is also
        home to such trustworthy agencies as the Secret Service
        and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.)
        
        They reaffirmed the export embargo on robust encryption
        products, admitting for the first time that its purpose
        was to stifle competition to Clipper. And they outlined
        a very porous set of requirements under which the cops
        might get the keys to your  chip. (They would not go
        into the procedure by which the National Security
        Agency could get them, though they assured us it was
        sufficient.)
        
        They even signaled the impending return of the dread
        Digital Telephony, an FBI legislative initiative
        requiring fundamental reengineering of the information
        infrastructure; providing wiretapping ability to the
        FBI would then become the paramount  design priority.
        
        
                     INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS
        
        Actually, by the time the announcements thudded down, I
        wasn't surprised by them. I had spent several days the
        previous week in and around the White House.
        
        I felt like I was in another remake of The Invasion of
        the Body Snatchers. My friends in the administration
        had been transformed. They'd been subsumed by the vast
        mindfield on the other side of the security clearance
        membrane, where dwell the  monstrous bureaucratic
        organisms that feed on fear. They'd been infected by
        the institutionally paranoid National Security Agency's
        Weltanschauung.
        
        They used all the telltale phrases. Mike Nelson, the
        White House point man on the NII, told me, "If only I
        could tell you what I know, you'd feel the same way I
        do." I told him I'd been inoculated against that
        argument during Vietnam. (And it does  seem to me that
        if you're going to initiate a process that might end
        freedom in America, you probably need an argument that
        isn't classified.)
        
        Besides, how does he know what he knows? Where does he
        get his information? Why, the National Security Agency,
        of course. Which, given its strong interest in the
        outcome, seems hardly an unimpeachable source.
        
        However they reached it, Clinton and Gore have an
        astonishingly simple bottom line, to which even the
        future of American liberty and prosperity is secondary:
        They believe that it is their responsibility to
        eliminate, by whatever means, the  possibility that
        some terrorist might get a nuke and use it on, say, the
        World Trade Center. They have been convinced that such
        plots are more likely to ripen to hideous fruition
        behind a shield of encryption.
        
        The staffers I talked to were unmoved by the argument
        that anyone smart enough to steal a nuclear device is
        probably smart enough to use PGP or some other
        uncompromised crypto standard. And never mind that the
        last people who popped a hooter in the  World Trade
        Center were able to get it there without using any
        cryptography and while under FBI surveillance.
        
        We are dealing with religion here. Though only ten
        American lives have been lost to terrorism in the last
        two years, the primacy of this threat has become as
        much an article of faith with these guys as the
        Catholic conviction that human life begins  at
        conception or the Mormon belief that the Lost Tribe of
        Israel crossed the Atlantic in submarines.
        
        In the spirit of openness and compromise, they invited
        the Electronic Frontier Foundation to submit other
        solutions to the "problem" of the nuclear-enabled
        terrorist than key escrow devices, but they would not
        admit into discussion the argument that  such a threat
        might, in fact, be some kind of phantasm created by the
        spooks to ensure their lavish budgets into the post-
        Cold War era.
        
        As to the possibility that good old-fashioned
        investigative techniques might be more valuable in
        preventing their show-case catastrophe (as it was after
        the fact in finding the alleged perpetrators of the
        last attack on the World Trade Center), they  just
        hunkered down and said that when wiretaps were
        necessary, they were damned well necessary.
        
        When I asked about the business that American companies
        lose because of their inability to export good
        encryption products, one staffer essentially dismissed
        the market, saying that total world trade in crypto
        goods was still less than a billion  dollars. (Well,
        right. Thanks more to the diligent efforts of the
        National Security Agency than to dim sales potential.)
        
        I suggested that a more immediate and costly real-world
        effect of their policies would be to reduce national
        security by isolating American commerce, owing to a
        lack of international confidence in the security of our
        data lines. I said that Bruce  Sterling's fictional
        data-enclaves in places like the Turks and Caicos
        Islands were starting to look real-world inevitable.
        
        They had a couple of answers to this, one unsatisfying
        and the other scary. The unsatisfying answer was that
        the international banking community could just go on
        using DES, which still seemed robust enough to them.
        (DES is the old federal Data  Encryption Standard,
        thought by most cryptologists to be nearing the end of
        its credibility.)
        
        More frightening was their willingness to counter the
        data-enclave future with one in which no data channels
        anywhere would be secure from examination by one
        government or another. Pointing to unnamed other
        countries that were developing their own  mandatory
        standards and restrictions regarding cryptography, they
        said words to the effect of, "Hey, it's not like you
        can't outlaw the stuff. Look at France."
        
        Of course, they have also said repeatedly - and for now
        I believe them - that they have absolutely no plans to
        outlaw non-Clipper crypto in the US. But that doesn't
        mean that such plans wouldn't develop in the presence
        of some pending "emergency."  Then there is that White
        House briefing document, issued at the time Clipper was
        first announced, which asserts that no US citizen "as a
        matter of right, is entitled to an unbreakable
        commercial encryption product."
        
        Now why, if it's an ability they have no intention of
        contesting, do they feel compelled to declare that it's
        not a right? Could it be that they are preparing us for
        the laws they'll pass after some bearded fanatic has
        gotten himself a surplus nuke  and used something
        besides Clipper to conceal his plans for it?
        
        If they are thinking about such an eventuality, we
        should be doing so as well. How will we respond? I
        believe there is a strong, though currently untested,
        argument that outlawing unregulated crypto would
        violate the First Amendment, which surely  protects the
        manner of our speech as clearly as it protects the
        content.
        
        But of course the First Amendment is, like the rest of
        the Constitution, only as good as the government's
        willingness to uphold it. And they are, as I say, in
        the mood to protect our safety over our liberty.
        
        This is not a mind-frame against which any argument is
        going to be very effective. And it appeared that they
        had already heard and rejected every argument I could
        possibly offer.
        
        In fact, when I drew what I thought was an original
        comparison between their stand against naturally
        proliferating crypto and the folly of King Canute (who
        placed his throne on the beach and commanded the tide
        to leave him dry), my government  opposition looked
        pained and said he had heard that one almost as often
        as jokes about roadkill on the information
        superhighway.
        
        I hate to go to war with them. War is always nastier
        among friends. Furthermore, unless they've decided to
        let the National Security Agency design the rest of the
        National Information Infrastructure as well, we need to
        go on working closely with  them on the whole range of
        issues like access, competition, workplace privacy,
        common carriage, intellectual property, and such.
        Besides, the proliferation of strong crypto will
        probably happen eventually no matter what they do.
        
        But then again, it might not. In which case we could
        shortly find ourselves under a government that would
        have the automated ability to log the time, origin and
        recipient of every call we made, could track our
        physical whereabouts continuously,  could keep better
        account of our financial transactions than we do, and
        all without a warrant. Talk about crime prevention!
        
        Worse, under some vaguely defined and surely mutable
        "legal authority," they also would be able to listen to
        our calls and read our e-mail without having to do any
        backyard rewiring. They wouldn't need any permission at
        all to monitor overseas calls.
        
        If there's going to be a fight, I'd rather it be with
        this government than the one we'd likely face on that
        hard day.
        
        Hey, I've never been a paranoid before. It's always
        seemed to me that most governments are too incompetent
        to keep a good plot strung together all the way from
        coffee break to quitting time. But I am now very
        nervous about the government of the  United States of
        America.
        
        Because Bill 'n' Al, whatever their other new-paradigm
        virtues, have allowed the very old-paradigm trogs of
        the Guardian Class to define as their highest duty the
        defense of America against an enemy that exists
        primarily in the imagination - and is  therefore
        capable of anything.
        
        To assure absolute safety against such an enemy, there
        is no limit to the liberties we will eventually be
        asked to sacrifice. And, with a Clipper Chip in every
        phone, there will certainly be no technical limit on
        their ability to enforce those  sacrifices.
        
        
                            WHAT YOU CAN DO
        
                GET CONGRESS TO LIFT THE CRYPTO EMBARGO
        
        The administration is trying to impose Clipper on us by
        manipulating market forces. By purchasing massive
        numbers of Clipper devices, they intend to induce an
        economy of scale which will make them cheap while the
        export embargo renders all  competition either
        expensive or nonexistent.
        
        We have to use the market to fight back. While it's
        unlikely that they'll back down on Clipper deployment,
        the Electronic Frontier Foundation believes that with
        sufficient public involvement, we can get Congress to
        eliminate the export embargo.
        
        Rep. Maria Cantwell, D-Washington, has a bill (H.R.
        3627) before the Economic Policy, Trade, and
        Environment Subcommittee of the House Committee on
        Foreign Affairs that would do exactly that. She will
        need a lot of help from the public. They may not  care
        much about your privacy in DC, but they still care
        about your vote.
        
        Please signal your support of H.R. 3627, either by
        writing her directly or e-mailing her at
        cantwell@eff.org. Messages sent to that address will be
        printed out and delivered to her office. In the subject
        header of your message, please include the  words
        "support HR 3627." In the body of your message, express
        your reasons for supporting the bill. You may also
        express your sentiments to Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-
        Indiana, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs chair,
        by e-mailing hamilton@eff.org.
        
        Furthermore, since there is nothing quite as powerful
        as a letter from a constituent, you should check the
        following list of subcommittee and committee members to
        see if your congressional representative is among them.
        If so, please copy them your  letter to Rep. Cantwell.
        
        > Economic Policy, Trade, and Environment Subcommittee:
        
        Democrats: Sam Gejdenson (Chair), D-Connecticut; James
        Oberstar, D-Minnesota; Cynthia McKinney, D-Georgia;
        Maria Cantwell, D-Washington; Eric Fingerhut, D-Ohio;
        Albert R. Wynn, D-Maryland; Harry Johnston, D-Florida;
        Eliot Engel, D-New York; Charles Schumer, D-New York.
        
        Republicans: Toby Roth (ranking), R-Wisconsin; Donald
        Manzullo, R-Illinois; Doug Bereuter, R-Nebraska; Jan
        Meyers, R-Kansas; Cass Ballenger, R-North Carolina;
        Dana Rohrabacher, R-California.
        
        > House Committee on Foreign Affairs:
        
        Democrats: Lee Hamilton (Chair), D-Indiana; Tom Lantos,
        D-California; Robert Torricelli, D-New Jersey; Howard
        Berman, D-California; Gary Ackerman, D-New York; Eni
        Faleomavaega, D-Somoa; Matthew Martinez, D-California;
        Robert Borski, D-Pennsylvania;  Donal Payne, D-New
        Jersey; Robert Andrews, D-New Jersey; Robert Menendez,
        D-New Jersey; Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio; Alcee Hastings, D-
        Florida; Peter Deutsch, D-Florida; Don Edwards, D-
        California; Frank McCloskey, D-Indiana; Thomas Sawyer,
        D-Ohio; Luis  Gutierrez, D-Illinois.
        
        Republicans: Benjamin Gilman (ranking), R-New York;
        William Goodling, R-Pennsylvania; Jim Leach, R-Iowa;
        Olympia Snowe, R-Maine; Henry Hyde, R-Illinois;
        Christopher Smith, R-New Jersey; Dan Burton, R-Indiana;
        Elton Gallegly, R-California; Ileana  Ros-Lehtinen, R-
        Florida; David Levy, R-New York; Lincoln Diaz-Balart,
        R-Florida; Ed Royce, R-California.
        
        
                    BOYCOTT CLIPPER DEVICES AND THE
                       COMPANIES WHICH MAKE THEM.
        
        Don't buy anything with a Clipper Chip in it. Don't buy
        any product from a company that manufactures devices
        with Big Brother inside. It is likely that the
        government will ask you to use Clipper for
        communications with the IRS or when doing business
        with federal agencies. They cannot, as yet, require you
        to do so. Just say no.
        
        
                       LEARN ABOUT ENCRYPTION AND
                       EXPLAIN THE ISSUES TO YOUR
                            UNWIRED FRIENDS
        
        The administration is banking on the likelihood that
        this stuff is too technically obscure to agitate anyone
        but nerds like us. Prove them wrong by patiently
        explaining what's going on to all the people you know
        who have never touched a computer and  glaze over at
        the mention of words like "cryptography."
        
        Maybe you glaze over yourself. Don't. It's not that
        hard. For some hands-on experience, download a copy of
        PGP - Pretty Good Privacy - a shareware encryption
        engine which uses the robust RSA encryption algorithm.
        And learn to use it.
        
        
                          GET YOUR COMPANY TO
                       THINK ABOUT EMBEDDING REAL
                      CRYPTOGRAPHY IN ITS PRODUCTS
        
        If you work for a company that makes software, computer
        hardware, or any kind of communications device, work
        from within to get them to incorporate RSA or some
        other strong encryption scheme into their products. If
        they say that they are afraid to  violate the export
        embargo, ask them to consider manufacturing such
        products overseas and importing them back into the
        United States. There appears to be no law against that.
        Yet.
        
        You might also lobby your company to join the Digital
        Privacy and Security Working Group, a coalition of
        companies and public interest groups - including IBM,
        Apple, Sun, Microsoft, and, interestingly, Clipper
        phone manufacturer AT&T - that is  working to get the
        embargo lifted.
        
        
                                ENLIST!
        
        Self-serving as it sounds coming from me, you can do a
        lot to help by becoming a member of one of these
        organizations. In addition to giving you access to the
        latest information on this subject, every additional
        member strengthens our credibility  with Congress.
        
        > Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation by writing
        membership@eff.org.
        
        > Join Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
        by e-mailing cpsr.info@cpsr.org. CPSR is also
        organizing a protest, to which you can lend your
        support by sending e-mail to clipper.petition@cpsr.org
        with "I oppose Clipper" in the message body.
        Ftp/gopher/WAIS to
        cpsr.org/cpsr/privacy/crypto/clipper for more info.
        
        
        In his LA speech, Gore called the development of the
        NII "a revolution." And it is a revolutionary war we
        are engaged in here. Clipper is a last ditch attempt by
        the United States, the last great power from the old
        Industrial Era, to establish  imperial control over
        cyberspace. If they win, the most liberating
        development in the history of humankind could become,
        instead, the surveillance system which will monitor our
        grandchildren's morality. We can be better ancestors
        than that.
        
                                      San Francisco, California
                                    Wednesday, February 9, 1994
        
                                 * * *
        
        John Perry Barlow (barlow@eff.org) is co-founder and
        Vice-Chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a
        group which defends liberty, both in Cyberspace and the
        Physical World. He has three daughters.
        
        
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