Note: I'm just passing this on. I am only the messenger. ------- Forwarded Message Return-Path: research!cs.georgetown.edu!denning Received: from big.l1135.att.com by codex.UUCP (4.1/4.7) id AA26751; Wed, 23 Feb 94 16:18:14 EST Received: from research (research.research.att.com) by big.l1135.att.com (4.1/4.7) id AA08487; Wed, 23 Feb 94 16:18:13 EST Posted-Date: Wed, 23 Feb 1994 16:16:09 -0500 (EST) Received: by ninet.research.att.com; Wed Feb 23 16:17 EST 1994 Received: from cs (cs.cosc.georgetown.edu) by guvax.acc.georgetown.edu (PMDF V4.2-11 #5850) id <01H98BXBMQA88YCH3A@guvax.acc.georgetown.edu>; Wed, 23 Feb 1994 16:16:33 EST Received: from chair by cs (4.1/SMI-4.1.2) id AA01896; Wed, 23 Feb 94 16:16:09 EST Date: Wed, 23 Feb 1994 16:16:09 -0500 (EST) From: denning@cs.georgetown.edu (Dorothy Denning) Subject: Newsday Editorial Errors-To: Postmaster@cs.georgetown.edu Message-Id: <9402232116.AA01896@cs> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT ====================================================================== | Newsday, Tuesday, February 22, 1994, Viewpoints | ====================================================================== The Clipper Chip Will Block Crime By Dorothy E. Denning Hidden among the discussions of the information highway is a fierce debate, with huge implications for everyone. It centers on a tiny computer chip called the Clipper, which uses sophisticated coding to scramble electronic communications transmitted through the phone system. The Clinton administration has adopted the chip, which would allow law enforcement agencies with court warrants to read the Clipper codes and eavesdrop on terrorists and criminals. But opponents say that, if this happens, the privacy of law-abiding individuals will be a risk. They want people to be able to use their own scramblers, which the government would not be able to decode. If the opponents get their way, however, all communications on the information highway would be immune from lawful interception. In a world threatened by international organized crime, terrorism, and rogue governments, this would be folly. In testimony before Congress, Donald Delaney, senior investigator with the New York State Police, warned that if we adopted an encoding standard that did not permit lawful intercepts, we would have havoc in the United States. Moreover, the Clipper coding offers safeguards against casual government intrusion. It requires that one of the two components of a key embedded in the chip be kept with the Treasury Department and the other component with the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology. Any law enforcement official wanting to wiretap would need to obtain not only a warrant but the separate components from the two agencies. This, plus the superstrong code and key system would make it virtually impossible for anyone, even corrupt government officials, to spy illegally. But would terrorists use Clipper? The Justice Department has ordered $8 million worth of Clipper scramblers in the hope that they will become so widespread and convenient that everyone will use them. Opponents say that terrorists will not be so foolish as to use encryption to which the government holds the key but will scramble their calls with their own code systems. But then who would have thought that the World Trade Center bombers would have been stupid enough to return a truck that they had rented? Court-authorized interception of communications has been essential for preventing and solving many serious and often violent crimes, including terrorism, organized crime, drugs, kidnaping, and political corruption. The FBI alone has had many spectacular successes that depended on wiretaps. In a Chicago case code-named RUKBOM, they prevented the El Rukn street gang, which was acting on behalf of the Libyan government, from shooting down a commercial airliner using a stolen military weapons system. To protect against abuse of electronic surveillance, federal statutes impose stringent requirements on the approval and execution of wiretaps. Wiretaps are used judiciously (only 846 installed wiretaps in 1992) and are targeted at major criminals. Now, the thought of the FBI wiretapping my communications appeals to me about as much as its searching my home and seizing my papers. But the Constitution does not give us absolute privacy from court-ordered searches and seizures, and for good reason. Lawlessness would prevail. Encoding technologies, which offer privacy, are on a collision course with a major crime-fighting tool: wiretapping. Now the Clipper chip shows that strong encoding can be made available in a way that protects private communications but does not harm society if it gets into the wrong hands. Clipper is a good idea, and it needs support from people who recognize the need for both privacy and effective law enforcement on the information highway. ====================================================================== | Copyright Newsday. All rights reserved. This article can be freely | | distributed on the net provided this note is kept intact, but it may | | not be sold or used for profit without permission of Newsday. | ====================================================================== ------- End of Forwarded Message