Date: Thu, 22 Aug 1996 15:28:48 -0700 From: ezundel@cts.com (E. Zndel) Good Morning from the Zundelsite: I have a sweet friend in Santa Barbara, California who grew up with me in the rain forests of South America. Elvira and I share many things, including an "encryption language" of sorts. We used it with relish as teenagers when the Mennonite Elders were spying on us, trying to ferret out secrets. The key was really very simple, but our "government" just never managed to catch on. It used to drive them wild. Yet it was so ridiculously simple - ". . . repeat a vowel with a 'b'". Prebesibidebent Clibintobon? Kapish? Just practice it a bit - no one will understands it! It is hilarious. It gave us a tremendous edge on wickedness - mostly romantic wickedness but now and then legitimate revolt against authority peddling a dogma we didn't always like. This story often comes to mind as I peruse the arguments regarding censorship, particularly as I was reading a recent Phyllis Schlafly's essay on "Clinton Is Trying to be Big Brother": ". . . We hope the appropriate government agencies will soon solve the recent terrorist crimes and punish the criminals. But all Americans who care about civil liberties should vigorously resist President Clinton's attempt to use the terrorist attacks as an excuse to carry on his all-out war against the personal privacy of law-abiding Americans. Now the Clinton Administration is trying to make it illegal for individual Americans to have private conversations with one another. That's the real meaning of its effort to control encryption technology, and it's a direct assault on the First Amendment. It would be downright ridiculous to assert that the First Amendment guarantees our right to speak in public but not in private. It would be just as ridiculous to say that we have freedom to speak in words that the government can understand, but not in words the government can't decipher. Americans have the right to speak to one another in private, behind closed doors, and we should likewise have the right to speak to one another in code and to put our coded messages on computer in a process called encryption. Americans would not tolerate the government opening and reading the letters we send through the mails, and we should not tolerate the government opening and reading our encrypted, or coded, messages sent via computer. Yet, Attorney General Janet Reno, FBI Director Louis Freeh, and Vice President Al Gore are all demanding the authority to read our encrypted messages. In a speech to the Commonwealth Club of California, Reno bluntly stated her demand for "ensuring law enforcement access to encrypted data.'' Reno boasted that there is "a consensus'' that the government should create a system known as "Key Escrow'' (i.e., a supposedly "neutral third party''), to which all Americans should be forced to "entrust'' the keys to their encrypted messages, and to which the government would have access. On the contrary, there is no such consensus. Do you trust Janet Reno with access to your private messages? Do you trust the FBI to keep your files confidential? On July 12, Al Gore announced that the Administration will continue to push for the adoption of a massive public key infrastructure to give the government access to all encrypted communications. In a blatant bid for a police-state surveillance society, Gore warned about "the dangers of unregulated encryption technology." A neutral panel of the National Research Council was set up to make policy recommendations about encryption. The panel called on the government to abandon its efforts to restrict encryption. The NSC panel concluded that increased use of encryption would enhance our national security, not diminish it. Thirteen out of its 16 members had security clearances with access to secret information, and they saw no national security reason to justify the Clinton policy. The Clinton Administration bases its campaign to control private encryption on the alleged need to fight crime through wiretapping. However, the NSC panel concluded that the ability of the private sector to transfer confidential financial and other data over the information highway without interception is far more important. Encryption is a First Amendment issue, not a crime issue. If the Clinton Administration is allowed to control encryption, it would be the biggest expansion of federal power since the passage of the Income Tax Amendment in 1913 . . ." And come to think of it, still after all these years: the Elders had no business whatsoever spying on some teenagers. They made the laws, and they enforced the laws, and it was pretty much authoritarian business, but even as young teenagers we knew that what they did was Trespass! They had their reasons - but we had ours! It was called privacy. Nebeveber lebet aba foobool kibiss youbou obor aba kibiss foobool youbou! Advice to the wise in these perilous times. Ingrid Thought for the Day: "All the fun's in how you say a thing." (Robert Frost)