Balancing National Interests

Date: Sat, 14 Nov 1992 20:17:06 -0500 To: interesting_people@aurora.cis.upenn.edu From: Dave Farber Subject: from RISKS Reprinted with permission ("do with it as you wish. Granger") A "Viewpoint " piece in The Institute, November 1992 Balancing National Interests The September/October issue of The Institute carried a front page story reporting that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is promoting legislation that would require all telephone systems to be designed in such a way that they can be wiretapped by law enforcement officials. The argument is that wiretapping is a key tool in much of law enforcement, particularly in fields such as drugs, racketeering, conspiracy and white collar crime, and that unless care is taken in the design of future telecommunications systems, this tool may become difficult or impossible to exercise. To solve this problem the FBI is promoting legislation that would establish design requirements on future telephone systems. Not surprisingly, civil liberties groups and telephone companies are reported to be less than enthusiastic. While interesting and important in its own right, this controversy is perhaps even more important as a symbol of a broader set of conflicts between a number of important national interests. As a country, we want to promote: * Individual privacy (including the right of citizens and other residents of the U.S. to keep personal records private, hold private communications with others, and move about without being "tracked".) * Security for organizations (including protection of financial transactions, and the ability to keep corporate data, plans, and communications confidential.) * Effective domestic law enforcement (including the ability to perform surveillance of legitimately identified suspects, and the ability to audit and reconstruct fraudulent activities.) * Effective international intelligence gathering (including the ability to monitor the plans and activities of organizations abroad that may pose a threat to the U.S. or to other peaceful states and peoples.) * Secure world-wide reliable communications for U.S. diplomats and the military, for U.S. business, and for U.S. citizens in their activities all around the world (including the ability to maintain and gain access to secure, reliable, communications channels.) Just as with most of our society's other fundamental objectives, these objectives are in conflict. You can not maximize them all because getting more of some involves giving up some of others. A dynamic tension must be created that keeps the various objectives properly balanced. That socially optimal point of balance may change gradually over time as world conditions and our society's values evolve. An electrical engineer who thinks for a moment about the problem of achieving any particular specified balance among the various objectives I have listed will quickly conclude that communications and information technology design choices lie at the heart of the way in which many of the necessary tradeoffs will be made. We would like easy portable communications for all, but doing that in a way that allows people to keep their legitimate travels private poses significant design challenges. Banks and other businesses would like secure encrypted communications world-wide, but promoting the general availability of such technologies all around the world severely complicates the signal intelligence operations of intelligence organizations. The troubling thing about the FBI's legislative proposals is not that they are being made, but that we lack a broader institutional context within which to evaluate them. In making such choices, we need to look systematically at all the legitimate interests that are at stake in telecommunications and information technology design choices, consider the ways in which technology and the world are evolving, and integrate all these considerations to arrive at a reasoned balance. In the old days, if things got too far out of line in some balance (for example, between freedom of the press and protection against liable), the courts simply readjusted things and we went on. Today, and increasingly in the future, with many of these balances hard wired into the basic design of our information and communication systems, it may be much harder to readjust the balance after the fact. There are several organizations that should be working harder on these issues. On the government side the Telecommunication and Computing Technologies Program in the Office of Technology Assessment should be doing more systematic studies of these tradeoffs to help inform the Congress; The National Telecommunications and Information Administration in the Department of Commerce (or some appropriate interagency committee) should be doing similar studies to develop more coherent and comprehensive executive branch policy; and the Office of Policy and Plans in the Federal Communications Commission (which is an independent regulatory agency not directly subject to executive branch policy) should be giving these issues more attention so it can better support the Commissioners when they confront such tradeoffs. On the non-government side, the Office of Computer and Information Technology at the National Research Council might appropriately mount a comprehensive study. There is an ideal opportunity here for a private foundation to fund an independent blue-ribbon commission. Finally, the computer and telecommunications industries, both individually and collectively through their industry associations, should be taking more interest in how the country will strike these all important balances. M. Granger Morgan M. Granger Morgan (F) is head of the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University where he is also a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and in the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management. He teaches and performs research on a variety of problems in technology and public policy in which technical issues are of central importance.