6/12:EDITORIAL: A CLOSER LOOK ON WIRETAPPING c.1994 N.Y. Times News Service The New York Times said in an editorial on Sunday, June 12: The government's ability to tap private phone calls is under siege. Newly developed encryption systems allow callers to mathematically scramble their messages so that no one, including the government, can eavesdrop. And digital technology - from cellular phones to call-forwarding - makes wiretapping increasingly difficult. The Clinton administration is running scared and proposes two fixes, neither satisfactory. Government needs to wiretap under legally restricted circumstances. Though used sparingly during the 1980s (1,000 a year), taps helped convict more than 20,000 felons. But before tampering with existing arrangements, the administration must show that its proposals are workable and will not trample on existing rights to conduct private phone conversations. So far it has cleared neither hurdle. To overcome private encryption, the administration will encourage people who plan to encode calls to buy phones with a government-designed encryption system, known as Clipper, built into the hardware; the government, with judicial approval, would be able to unscramble the messages. But the policy is unlikely to work because Clipper phones are unlikely to dominate the market - leaving Washington the choice of admitting defeat or turning Big Brotherish and outlawing non-Clipper encryption systems. To overcome technological barriers, the Federal Bureau of Investigation proposes a second fix: legislation that would require phone companies to adopt only those technologies that preserve the government's ability to wiretap. The problem with this plan is that its sweeping prohibitions threaten to stop telecommunication innovations before anyone calculates the consequences. The administration would like to begin by encouraging the IRS and other agencies to buy Clipper phones; it might then require private parties that wish to send the government encoded messages to do so only with Clipper phones. The government hopes that in time Clipper phones would become standard equipment everywhere. Callers using other encryption systems would have to plan ahead and acquire compatible software, a big task for run-of-the-mill criminals. But many experts predict that Clipper phones will not become standard. There are easy-to-use encryption systems that require no special phones, no shared secret passwords. And, unlike Clipper, they cannot be intercepted by the government. Because un-tappable systems will prove attractive the private market is likely to make them as readily available as Clipper. Clipper uses a secret mathematical formula for scrambling calls. But there are flaws in the formula, as The New York Times recently revealed. The danger with secret formulas is that someone in or outside government could discover a new flaw and exploit it to tap encoded calls without a court order. Another bad feature concerns the passwords (actually, numbers) the government needs to unscramble calls from Clipper phones. The passwords would be held in escrow by two federal agencies (and released to the FBI upon presentation of a court order). A better way to protect against government abuse would be to entrust passwords to the courts or designated non-government organizations. The FBI's fix - requiring phone companies to build easily tappable systems - raises the unsettling image of forcing a phone company to design its "home" so that the police can easily enter. And the fix is unnecessarily blunt. The government could compel phone companies to solve specific problems, like making call-forwarding tappable. The administration is right to worry about its ability to tap phones for legitimate law enforcement. So far, its suggestions for safeguarding that ability seem unworkable and potentially intrusive.