Subject: File 1--Clipping the Wings of Freedom (Reprint, by J.P. Barlow)

From: John Perry Barlow <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 13 Mar 1994 11:30:17 -0500

Clipping the Wings of Freedom		page 1

Jackboots on the Infobahn
by John Perry Barlow
<[email-masked]>

[Note: I wish to reserve to Wired Magazine first paper publication of
the following piece. However, given the fairly immediate nature of
this issue, I am net-casting it now. Feel free to pass it on
electronically as you see fit, but please do not turn it into any sort
of hard copy until Wired has done so. I also encourage you to buy the
April issue of Wired in which it will appear.]

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 Vice President's announced program
incorporated many of the concepts of open competition, universal
access, and deregulated common carriage which we'd been pushing for
the previous year.

But he had said nothing about 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 him what this had meant regarding Administration
policy on cryptography. He became non-committal as a cigar store
indian.  "We'll be making some announcements... I can't tell you
anything more." He hurried back 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/Gore
Administration policies regarding cryptography have not demonstrated
an enlightenment to match the rest of their digital visions.

The Clipper Chip...which bodes to be either the goofiest waste of
federal dollars since Gerald Ford's great Swine Flu program or, if
actually deployed, a surveillance technology of profound
malignancy...seemed at first an ugly legacy of Reagan/Bush. "This is
going to be our Bay of Pigs," one White House official told me at the
time Clipper was introduced, referring to the distastrous Cuban
invasion plan Kennedy inherited from Eisenhower.

(Clipper, in case you're just tuning in, is an encryption chip which
the NSA 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 recipient. 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 trusting a
peeping tom to install your window blinds. And, since the folks I've
met in this White House seem extremely smart, conscious, and
freedom-loving...hell, a lot of them are Deadheads...I was sure that
after they felt fully moved in, they'd face down the NSA and FBI, let
Clipper die a natural death, and lower the export embargo on reliable
encryption products.

Furthermore, NIST and the National Security Council have been studying
both Clipper and export embargoes since April. Given that the volumes
of expert testimony they collected opposed them both almost
unanimously , I expected the final report to give the Administration
all the support it needed to do the right thing.

I was wrong about this. Instead, there would be no report. Apparently,
they couldn't draft one which supported, on the evidence, what they
had decided to do instead.

THE OTHER SHOE DROPS

On Friday, February 4, the other jack-boot 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 NSA 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 NIST 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 re-affirmed 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 NSA would get them,
though they assured us it was sufficient.)

They even signaled the impending return of the dread Digital
Telephony, an FBI legislative initiative which would require
fundamentally re-engineering the information infrastructure to make
provision of wiretapping ability the paramount design priority.

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS

Actually, by the time the announcements thudded down, I wan'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 re-make of The Invasion of the Body
Snatchers.  My friends in the Administration had been transformed.
They'd been subsumed by the vast mind-field on the other side of the
security clearance membrane, where dwell the monstrous bureaucratic
organisms which feed themselves on fear. They'd adopted the
institutionally paranoid National Security Weltanschauung.

They used all the tell-tale phrases. Mike Nelson, the White House
point man on 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 which 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 NSA, 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, against 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 their
hideous fruition behind a shield of encryption.

The staffers I talked to were unmoved by the argument that anyone
smart enough to steal and detonate 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 put it there without using any cryptography and
while under FBI surveillance.

We are dealing with religion here. Though only 10 American lives were
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 EFF to submit
other solutions to the "problem" of the nuclear-enabled terrorist
besides 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 wire-taps were necessary, they were damned well necessary.

When I asked about the business that American companies lose to 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  NSA than lack of sales potential.)

I suggested that a more immediate and costly real-world effect of
their policies would be reducing 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.  Their first 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 troubling was their willingness to counter the data-enclave
future with one in which no data channels anywhere would be secure
from examination by some government or another. They pointed to
unnamed other countries which were developing their own mandatory
standards and restrictions regarding cryptography and have said to me
on several occasions words to the effect that, "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 U.S. But that doesn't mean that such plans couldn'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 U.S. 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 of the to
uphold it. And they are, as I say, in a 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 opposition looked pained and said he had heard
that one almost as often as jokes about road-kill 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 NSA 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 everycall 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. (And wouldn't
even need that to monitor our overseas calls.)

If there's going to be a fight, I'd far 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 the
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. Purchasing massive numbers of Clipper devices, they
intend to produce an economy of scale which will make them cheap while
their export embargo renders all competition either expensive or
non-existent.

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-WA) has a bill (H.R. 3627) before the Economic
Policy, Trade, and Environment Science Subcommittee of the House
Foreign Affairs Committee which 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 [email-masked]. 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, the Foreign Relations Committee chairman, by e-mailing
[email-masked].

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 congressperson is among them. If so,
please copy them your letter to Ms. Cantwell.

Economic Policy, Trade, and Environment Science Subcommittee:
Democrats: Sam Gejdenson (Chairman), James Oberstar, Cynthia McKinney,
Maria Cantwell, Eric Fingerhut, Albert R. Wynn, Harry Johnston, Eliot
Engel, Charles Schumer. Republicans: Toby Roth (ranking), Donald
Manzullo, Doug Bereuter, Jan Meyers, Cass Ballenger, Dana Rohrabacher.

Foreign Affairs Committee:
Democrats: Lee Hamilton (Chairman), Tom Lantos, Robert Torricelli,
Howard Berman, Gary Ackerman, Eni Faleomavaega, Matthew Martinez,
Robert Borski, Donal Payne, Robert Andrews, Robert Menendez, Sherrod
Brown, Alcee Hastings, Peter Deutsch, Don Edwards, Frank McCloskey,
Thomas Sawyer, Luis Gutierrez. Republicans: Benjamin Gilman (ranking),
William Goodling, Jim Leach, Olympia Snowe, Henry Hyde, Christopher
Smith, Dan Burton, Elton Gallegly, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, David Levy,
Lincoln Diaz-Balart, Ed Royce.

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 which 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 too
technically obscure to agitate anyone but nerds like us. You 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, 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 which 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. As yet.

You might also lobby your company to join the Digital Privacy and
Security Working Group, a coalition of companies and public interest
groups that includes IBM, Apple, Sun, Microsoft (and, interestingly,
Clipper phone manufacturer AT&T) that is working to get the embargo
lifted.

JOIN EFF, CPSR, OR BOTH

Self-serving as it sounds coming from me, I think 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 [email-masked].
Join Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility by writing
[provide e-mail address here.]

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 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.

John Perry Barlow 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.