====================================================================== | Newsday, Tuesday, February 22, 1994, Viewpoints | ====================================================================== The Clipper Chip Will Block Crime By Dorothy E. Denning ..... ====================================================================== | Copyright Newsday. All rights reserved. This article can be freely | | distributed on the net provided this note is kept intact, but it may | | not be sold or used for profit without permission of Newsday. | ======================================================================
Dorothy Denning's article had a few interesting comments.
But would terrorists use Clipper? The Justice Department has ordered $8 million worth of Clipper scramblers in the hope that they
Are you saying the Justice Department are terrorists? :-) Or merely that this will subsidize the Clipperphone industry enough that honest cryptosystems will have a harder time competing?
will become so widespread and convenient that everyone will use them. Opponents say that terrorists will not be so foolish as to use encryption to which the government holds the key but will scramble their calls with their own code systems. But then who would have thought that the World Trade Center bombers would have been stupid enough to return a truck that they had rented?
Someone from NIST was also quoted in the newspapers agreeing that only the stupider criminals would use Clipper. On the other hand, the government is trying *very* hard to get the cellular phone industry to adopt Clipper, and I would think this deserves a mention, since the government's limitation on the number oflayers in the cellphone market means that citizens don't really have a choice.
Moreover, the Clipper coding offers safeguards against casual government intrusion. It requires that one of the two components of a key embedded in the chip be kept with the Treasury Department and the other component with the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology. Any law enforcement official wanting to wiretap would need to obtain not only a warrant but the separate components from the two agencies. This, plus the superstrong code and key system would make it virtually impossible for anyone, even corrupt government officials, to spy illegally.
I've found this claim to be one of the most annoying of the Clipper proponent's claims. The chip does *not* support two-agency escrow; it only has one key, necessitating some insecure keyloading procedure like the NSA-two-agents-and-a-laptop-in-a-vault charade. But the rules for handling the keys are only set by the attorney general, not by law or technology, and they are carefully written NOT to mention or forbid any other access by anyone else - especially the not-mentioned NSA.
The FBI alone has had many spectacular successes that depended on wiretaps. In a Chicago case code-named RUKBOM, they prevented the El Rukn street gang, which was acting on behalf of the Libyan government, from shooting down a commercial airliner using a stolen military weapons system.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't El Rukn the street gang that the government got in a lot of political hot water about for bribing informants with drugs, sex, and reduced prison sentences? Thanks; Bill Stewart # Bill Stewart AT&T Global Information Solutions, aka NCR Corp # 6870 Koll Center Parkway, Pleasanton CA, 94566 Phone 1-510-484-6204 fax-6399 # email bill.stewart@pleasantonca.ncr.com billstewart@attmail.com # ViaCrypt PGP Key IDs 384/C2AFCD 1024/9D6465