The New York Times Magazine, p. 23 September 4, 1994 Method and Madness Nicolas Wade [Subhead] Little Brother Not so long ago, high technology was seen as the likely handmaiden of totalitarian government, with surveillance systems and central computers tracking every citizen from cradle to grave. By a strange turn of events, what is now in progress is the very opposite of that nightmare. So many powerful technologies are streaming into private hands that Government is struggling to protect even the bare minimum of its legitimate domains. Once only governments could launch photoreconnaissance satellites; now the C.I A. is anxiously trying to curb commercial systems that can discern objects as small as a yard across, high-enough resolution to interest generals as much as geologists. A fleet of navigational satellites designed to give military commanders their exact position anywhere in the world is now in essence available to anyone; the Pentagon has let the public listen in on a degraded signal, but commercial vendors with clever algorithms can restore it to near-military accuracy. The computers that tie together the Government's information systems have become increasingly porous. The better their security systems, the more tempting the challenge. Earlier this year the Pentagon discovered that a coterie of computer hackers had penetrated large parts of its sensitive though unclassified computer network and had even taken control of several military computers. Think tanks and academics have warned for years, quite erroneously, that terrorists would avail themselves of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons; it hasn't happened, because none of these items are easy to use and simpler means have always been available. But the samples of stolen Russian uranium and plutonium that have recently been captured in Germany are a clear warning that this blithe era of security may now be over. The samples seem to have come from reactor fuel and laboratories, not nuclear warheads. But that is small comfort, especially in view of new calculations that only one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of plutonium is needed to make a bomb, not eight kilograms as was generally assumed. And the smugglers caught by the German police were hawking four kilograms for a mere $250 million. Perhaps the most surprising democratization of high technology is that of cryptography, once an elite art of those who guarded Government's most precious secrets. The first serious challenge to the National Security Agency's ability to crack almost everyone else's ciphers came from an ingenious coding approach created in academe in the mid-1970's and known as the public key cryptosystem. The commercial sponsor sold the program to American companies but was not allowed to export it. Then in 1991, a Colorado computer expert, Philip R. Zimmermann, produced a program apparently based on this system, which he named Pretty Good Privacy. A copy of Pretty Good Privacy found its way onto the Internet, free to takers from all countries, and all of a sudden Government-class security became available to everyone. Zimmermann's next project is to develop a pretty secure citizen's phone that scrambles conversations. At this point, of course, it's possible to wonder if the humiliation of Big Brother isn't being taken beyond reasonable limits. Some Government monopolies are not so bad: the use of force, for one. If you believe the F.B.I. is bugging your conversations, you'll want to see Zimmermann in the inventors' hall of fame; if terrorism and organized crime seem the more immediate threats, the universal right to absolute privacy looks less compelling. Is it possible for the state to get too weak in relation to its possible adversaries? That's the last thought that occurs to Americans across a wide spectrum of opinion, from free market economists to civil libertarians. From a variety of motives, they persistently call for governmental power to be curbed. The present headlong democratization of high technology is the flower of a decade of economic deregulation, and of the fading influence of military procurement as a driver of technical progress. The state is so familiar a political structure that its endurance is hard to doubt. For economists and political analysts, it is the only unit of account. Yet in his recent book, "The Transformation of War," the noted military historian Martin van Creveld argues that since modern states are no longer able to fight each other for fear of nuclear war, conventional warfare, too, has become outmoded. Since the purpose of states (at least in the view of military historians) is to fight each other, states that cannot do so must sooner or later yield to organizations that will, like sects, tribes and cults. "In North America and Western Europe, future war-making entities will probably resemble the Assassins, the group which ... terrorized the medieval Middle East for two centuries," van Creveld predicts. Regular armed forces, as has happened in Lebanon, will degenerate into police forces or mere armed gangs; the day of the condottieri will return. Van Creveld is not the only analyst to fear for the state. From quite different reasoning, the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington argued in a widely read essay in Foreign Affairs last year that world politics would be shaped in future by clashes between cultures and religions. As the West loses its military and economic predominance, the counterresponse from the rest of the world will be couched in religious and cultural terms: "The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future," he wrote. Even without fully embracing these forecasts of the state's eclipse, it's hard to ignore such recent incidents as the bombing of the World Trade Center or the car bombings of Jewish organizations in Buenos Aires and London. Terrorists with secure phones, satellite maps, accurate positioning and a sophisticated understanding of modern communications systems could bring down not just a few buildings but large sections of a modern economy. Big Brother is dead. The only serious likelihood of his resurrection lies in reaction to the chaos and disintegration that an era of Little Brothers might bring. ------------------- END