Hi -- I just submitted the ff. article to my local newspaper. I suggest lots of you do something similar. Our best chance to keep crypto free is to present it loudly and clearly as the way for our countries to *achieve* security, not an irresponsible demand that they forgo it. BTW I wrote _Scientific American_ to ask that they re-post David Chaum's 1992 article, "Achieving Electronic Privacy" that makes this point so well. It's easily Googled if they don't, though. Howie Goodell -- Howie Goodell hgoodell@cs.uml.edu Pr SW Eng, WearLogic Sc.D. Cand HCI Res Grp CS Dept U Massachussets Lowell http://people.ne.mediaone.net/goodell/howie Dying is soooo 20th-century! http://www.cryonics.org ====================== How to Win the New War ====================== The U.S. and its citizens have just suffered the Pearl Harbor of post-national conflicts. We are in a different kind of war, and we must fight it in many different ways. Here are four of the many hats we need to wear: · Cop · M.A.D.D. · Safety Engineer · Judge Wapner Global cop America is frequently accused of being a global policeman; now is the time to do it well. Investigate and hunt down not just a few leaders, but every member of the terrorist groups that participated in these attacks. Where governments cooperate, we can try these vicious criminals individually. Where this is impossible, we may go back to our pre-Kennedy Cold War rules and assassinate them. M.A.D.D. (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) Beyond finding the specific perpetrators of this attack, lead a crusade (jihad) against terrorism worldwide. This is easy to say now, but it will need to be carried out for decades, with serious money and smart people and determined politics. This jihad also needs single-mindedness. We are after terrorism, not ethnicity; we will cooperate with all governments and groups who can help us, and spare none who oppose us in this. The stakes are too high to play favorites. Safety Engineer Despite our best efforts to eradicate terrorism, it will be a factor in all our lives from now on. A lot of engineering designs in the industrialized world didn't take terrorism into account, but that world changed September 11. Security must be a major design goal of many features of our society: airplanes and airports, subways, stadiums, water supplies, product packaging, personal identification . The vulnerabilities of existing systems need painstaking analysis. Some upgrades will be expensive, in many ways. Creative engineering and thorough debate of the options are essential to keep the costs bearable and our brave new terrorist-resistant world livable. One example: the IDs for airplane crews, and eventually everyone who travels or goes near an airliner, could be "smart cards" containing their owners' biometric identifiers -- like fingerprints, voice, picture, and retinal scan -- cryptographically signed by the agency that collected them. (That agency or foreign government should be required to back its credential with a huge insurance policy to ensure they take it seriously.) This would make it almost impossible to get an unauthorized person through security, but it could be verified in seconds, without consulting a central database of everyone's data. In fact the scanners could be designed without removable storage or communications links: after a few days they would erase their records unless they were read out after a hijacking. This last point is crucial. Most of the debate about personal identification assumes there is a fundamental trade-off between being insecure and becoming a police state; therefore democracies have to settle for some compromise that is only halfway secure and only halfway free. This is not true today. Electronic and cryptographic technology like David Chaum's "blind signature" and "personal representative" lets us design systems with both strong security and strong protection of privacy and individual freedom. (See his August, 1992 _Scientific American_ article, "Achieving Electronic Privacy".) Judge Wapner ("The People's Court") Nobody of any ethnicity sacrifices his life without a cause. In the long run, the best solutions to terrorism probably include making a few of those causes go away. Before courts and law enforcement reached some regions of our country, there were deadly feuds there, too. Now instead of the Hatfields and the McCoys shooting it out for decades, a judge looks at their case, hands down a decision, and it gets enforced. Maybe after this horror we should take the cause that undoubtedly drove these suicide bombers and make it disappear: we should lose our patience with that little piss-ant real estate disagreement in the Middle East. Give the Israelis and Palestinians a month to agree on a map, or we'll do it for them. Then we add a 10-mile-wide corridor in the middle, let the Army Corps of Engineers give it a year of loving care, and announce we will blow away anything that moves in it for the next few decades. Note the glassy pellets strewn along the middle: their radioactivity is intense but short-lived. 30 years from now you might survive a crossing. Jerusalem belongs to the U.N. now. All rise!