At 6:46 PM -0700 7/17/96, Declan McCullagh wrote:
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 15:54:24 -0500 From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> To: fight-censorship+@andrew.cmu.edu Subject: Gorelick testifies before Senate, unveils new executive order
Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick testified yesterday before Sen. Sam Nunn's cyberscare hearing (take #3), where she ranted about the evils of the Net and unveiled an executive order signed by the president on Monday.
<Remainder of purple prose omitted.> Here's the problem in a nutshell: Everyone who has looked at our systems, from Cliff Stoll on to blue ribbon scientific commissions, has come to the conclusion that our society is vulnerable to willful sabotage from abroad, ranging from information sabotage (hacking electronic financial transactions) to physical sabotage (hacking power grid control computers to cause widespread power failures leading to serious damage to people and things; hacking the phone companies' computers, etc.). Some cases have already been observed. The field has already got a name and lots of publications. It's called "information warfare" and the government is taking it VERY seriously. Serious studies have shown that the kinds of protections to make the systems we depend on robust against determined and malicious attackers (say a terrorist government, or one bent on doing a lot of damage in retaliation for one of our policies they don't like), have costs beyond the capability of individual private sector actors. Your friendly neighborhood ISP, for instance, probably can't affort the iron belt and steel suspenders needed to make his system and its connectivity sabotage-proof, and so on. Even cheap but clever solutions involving encryption in such systems require standards and common practices across many institutions. In such a case, where public benefits from government action greatly exceed public (taxpayer) costs, and the private sector cannot (or will not) act unaided, the classical basis for government action in the interests of the citizenry exists. It's the economist's "lighthouse" argument. The motivation has nothing to do with privacy, government snooping, or any of the other things some get so excited about, though the solutions certainly have side effects in those domains. The goal should be to minimize the deleterious side-effects, not to throw out the baby with the bath water. David