Thank God for stumblebum spies. Ames could easily have encrypted his CIA secrets, foiling our best high-tech sleuths. That fact goes to the heart of a debate roiling the Clinton administration: the proper balance between privacy and public security in the dawning Digital Age. The problem is that the explosion of electronic information and instant communication creates enormous opportunities for abuse. A new generation of sophisticated techno-bandits will soon be prowling the information Highway, armed with technologies that will increasingly help them elude detection. To ferret out the bad guys-be they financial defrauders, spies or would-be terrorists-the good guys say they need help. The White House is determined to give it-and backs controversial legislation that would, in effect, turn the nation’s telephone system and electronic byways into a vast eavesdropping net. To critics, that smacks of Big Brother.
The battle promises to be a donnybrook. It also points up an unsettling development, at least for the cybercops. For years, government has monitored citizens’ private conversations and transactions. FBI wire-taps and electronic “bugs,” implanted with court permission, have sniffed out crooks. The National Security Agency’s satellites eyes and ears in the sky-alert us to espionage and terrorist plots. But those listening capabilities are eroding. One problem is that the nation’s digital phone networks are getting so fast and complicated that communications often can’t be tracked. To remedy that, the Justice Department proposes new laws requiring telephone companies to accommodate FBI wiretapping gear in their digital switching systems.
At the same time, commercial encryption programs have grown so sophisticated that cops can’t break the codes. The White House aims to fix that, too, by persuading businesses to install a standard encoding device, or “scrambler,” into every computer and telephone made in America. This so-called “Clipper chip,” a microprocessor designed by the National Security Agency, offers all the privacy you could wish-with one catch. It also comes with a built-in “back door,” to which the Feds have a “key.” Think of the arrangement as a sort of hotel. Every guest has his own room and doorlock; but management keeps a master key in some safe place, where no one but trusted hotel employees can get to it.
Sounds sensible, but the plan has civil-liberties folk in an uproar. Critics don’t buy government claims that it’s merely preserving the degree of surveillance it has always had. Instead, they foresee vastly more invasive eavesdropping. With the Clipper chip, writes New York Times columnist William Safire, echoing a common fear, federal snoopers can overhear “everything we say on a phone, everything we write on a computer, every order we give to a shopping network or bank or 800 or 900 number, every electronic note we leave our spouses or dictate to our personal-digital-assistant genies.” From the keepers of the secrets, there would be no secrets, no privacy.
The concern is understandable but overblown. After all, government eavesdroppers already scan the Internet, tap into computers and prowl our phone lines. That doesn’t mean they know “everything” about us. Courts ordered only slightly more than 8,000 criminal wiretaps over the last decade (resulting in some 22,000 convictions) and that isn’t likely to grow under a new surveillance regimen. “Enforcement agencies simply don’t have the time to monitor all these things,” says John O’Leary at the Computer Security Institute, a public-interest group in San Francisco. The Feds won’t barge through your back door unless they suspect a crime, and then only with a court order. “The civil libbers are yelling and screaming over the privacy issue,” O’Leary concludes. “But it isn’t realistic.”
That doesn’t mean the government should blithely go ahead. Take away the hyperbolic talk of freedom and democracy, and there remain very good reasons to rethink the Clipper chip and its kindred technologies. One is commercial. The Clinton administration has eased cold-war export controls on computers ‘and software. But the sale abroad of encryption technology remains highly restricted. Trouble is, that’s become one of the fastest-growing markets in the world. Trade associations say many millions of dollars’ worth of export business could be lost.
Another argument against the administration’s plan is that it won’t work. If private encryption is outlawed, only outlaws will have it. The Germans, Taiwanese and Israelis all offer software sophisticated enough to defy U.S. code breakers, Clipper or no Clipper. There are also doubts about whether the chip will improve security or compromise it. Business people are especially worried about giving the government a key to the corporate castle. “What if it’s lost?” asks Thomas Lipscomb of Infosafe Systems in New York. What if a hacker breaks into a government computer and gets the codes for Chase Manhattan Bank, or someone bribes an official for advance word of a competitor’s bid in a billion-dollar takeover war? The Feds are saying, “Trust us. This won’t happen,” says Lipscomb. “We don’t believe it.”
Few of the more pragmatic critics propose scrapping the Clipper. Instead, they suggest ways of restricting the number of federal officials who might have access to the master keys. Alternatively, companies choosing to use a different encryption system, assuming it were legal, might satisfy the government’s aims by filing “keys” with a special legal body. In the end, most businessmen couldn’t care less whether the government listens in. It’s the competition they worry about.
Washington hasn’t given the critics much heed. It plans to require all federal agencies to use Clipper, forcing companies doing business with the government to do so as well. That’s a big slice of the country but no matter. How many Aldrich Ameses could be lurking out there, anyway?
