-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Watching the rapid fire succession of Administration rulings and gambits, and the developments of various contending legislative proposals and industry initiatives, along with all the debate over the differing implications and portents of this distracting plethora of moves and countermoves, has made for quite an intriguing spectacle. In particular, the recent controversies over threatening elements in the SAFE bill and the motives of the legislators involved, as well as the contentions concerning Netscape's aims or quality of judgment in its latest key recovery announcements reminded me of some lines from R.G.H. Siu's _The Craft of Power_: ...There is an increasing need as time goes on for a voluntary surrender of freedom on the part of the people at large or at least for a relative passivity toward encroachments on it. An essential instrument for bringing this predisposition into being is propaganda. The purpose of your propaganda, then, should not be sympathetic education but subtle manipulation. [...] Orthodoxy should not comprise your primary objective in propaganda, but what Jaques Ellul has called orthopraxy. This is "an action that in itself, and not because of the value judgments of the person who is acting, leads directly to a goal, which for the individual is not a conscious and intentional objective to be attained, but which is considered such by the propagandist." Knowing the real action to be taken in furtherance of the objective behind the informational barrage, the propagandist "maneuvers the instrument that will secure this action." I thought Lucky Green keenly observed what might be considered an example of this process in action when a while back on the Cryptography list he wrote:
This simply attests to the thoroughness with which the GAK forces have managed to frame the debate. There is zero need for key recover if the goal is to locally obtain plaintext. However, the vast majority of large businesses out there have been convinced that they need key recovery to achieve this goal.
Therefore they are now demanding to be given a specific method for achieving this goal, the method most beneficial to outside forces.
A truly brilliant deception.
It is certainly a sly move, but like other sleights of hand, it benefits when a certain naivete is present in its targets. For businesses, there is an additional economic calculus involved that can sometimes make the deceptions harder to discern, or easier to swallow, or both to varying degrees. But for the adamant opponents of GAK, these subterfuges should not seem so obscure. It's clear by now that the core pro-GAK forces have a good appreciation of Sun Tzu's dictum that "All warfare is based on deception." There are some other passages from Sun Tzu that seem somewhat topical to recent events. In all fighting, the direct method may be used for joining battle, but indirect methods will be needed in order to secure victory. Indirect tactics, efficiently applied, are inexhaustible as Heaven and Earth, unending as the flow of rivers and streams; like the sun and the moon, they end but to begin anew; like the four season's, they pass away to return once more. ...Thus one who is skillful at keeping the enemy on the move maintains deceitful appearances, according to which the enemy will act. He sacrifices something, that the enemy may snatch at it. By holding out baits, he keeps him on the march; then with a body of picked men he lies in wait for him. Of course, the nature of the battlefield and the makeup of the forces contending are more complicated, subtle, and considerably more abstracted than the matters that Sun Tzu was concerned with. Nevertheless, certain themes remain timeless in warfare both military and psycho-political. Documents that EPIC and others have managed to acquire through FOIA requests show that duplicity has been part of the game plan on this issue since prior to the Klinton Administration. The hardcore surveillance state forces have long subscribed to the principle that "In war, practice dissimulation, and you will succeed." My impression is that they have adhered pretty consistently to that principle so far. It seems that some of the internecine controversy of late amongst the various factions in general opposition to GAK and other forms of privacy escrow and intrusion, to varying degrees, comes from disagreements regarding the relative merit or malignancy of differing political approaches and the motivations of the political actors involved. In part, this can depend upon where on the Anarchist-Minarchist-Benevolent_social_welfare_state spectrum they come from, and the intensity of their mistrust, or outright hostility, toward the process and role of government, but numerous other factors are involved. Many of these disagreements are valid and will continue (hopefully, though, not to the point of serving the purposes of the main adversary). One could argue that some who might really believe they are trying to preserve privacy will end up undermining it instead. The road to hell can indeed be paved with good intensions, as well as bad, naive, opportunistic, calculating, or craven... But in a broader strategic sense, those paving the road to hell, or what they are paving it with, can be less important than understanding the mentality of those who sway its course there, and the means they use to achieve their ends. Chief among these means is their use of deceit. Deception and sophistry are time honored tactics of those who want to build a more intrusive authoritarian state. The people who have promoted the kind of "2 + 2 = 5" reasoning that's been used to rationalize things like "good faith" exceptions to the Fourth Amendment, or the contemptible mockery of due process represented by government's abuse of civil forfeiture, are of essentially the same ilk as those who now expect citizens to accept assurances about "lawful authorization" and due process when it comes to their promotion of CALEA and GAK. The fearmongering exaggerations and misrepresentations that are spread by GAK proponents are part of a larger pattern as well. David Burnam's excellent 1996 book on the Justice Department _Above The Law_ does a good job of documenting some of this with respect to the flagrantly misleading representations of national crime statistics by the FBI and others early in the Clinton administration and before, and provides some useful perspective on their more recent claims concerning the need for new electronic surveillance infrastructures and encryption controls. It isn't simply the talent for facile deceit that characterizes the effective surveillance state advocate, but also the ability to maintain a pious pretense (and rarely perhaps even the self-delusion) of support for privacy and civil liberties while pushing the policies that undermine these very things. Senator Kerry's remarks on his Orwellianly titled "The Secure Public Networks Act" come to mind. A particularly telling and ironic example of this appears in a transcript from the FBI website of a speech given by Director Freeh in Krakow Poland during June 1994: "The Nazi terror began not by breaking the law but by using the law. The morning after the Reichstag fire in February, 1933, President Von Hindenburg was persuaded by Hitler to invoke Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. This emergency provision of the national law was the key to its elimination. It enabled Hitler to suspend individual and civil liberties, freedom of speech, press and assembly; it allowed warrantless searches of homes and the seizure of property without due process of law. [...] SS and SA members then started a wave of political violence which culminated in a March, 1933, Enabling Act granting dictatorial powers to Hitler. Hitler's brutal usurpation and exercise of power was in part carried out by clever use of the police and the corruptly controlled enactment of new laws." One wonders how Mr. Freeh went about reconciling this knowledge of history with his role as point man for the Clinton Administration's attempts to stampede legislation for new "anti-terrorism" powers following Oklahoma and last summers TWA explosion/Olympic bombing episodes. As Freeh's remarks reveal, the role terrorism has played in promoting the agendas of authoritarian statists has been quite notable. Terrorism's major consequences in history appear largely to have been to serve the expansion of the domestic powers of the states targeted, not the furtherance of the agendas of the terrorists responsible (or allegedly responsible). In fact, some states have found terrorism so valuable in this regard that when terrorists did not exist, it was necessary to invent them (or facilitate them, or exaggerate their threat). The state's concerted cultivation and fanning of fear and hysteria in relation to acts of terrorism (with the aid of the major mass media) is a increasingly refined art form. It's role has become so significant that it deserves a name. I call it State Sponsored Hysterrorism. While acts or threats of terrorism are the the most valuable adjunct to the exploitation of hysterrorism; fear mongering concerning other major bogeymen, most notably the specter of drugs, pornography and pedophilia, can occasionally be used to achieve the requisite level of alarmed herd psychology, and the extra marginalization of reasoned deliberation necessary to serve the ends of the hysterrorists. I think the U.S. Government's campaign of hysterrorism following the TWA explosion/Olympic-Park bombing is a case study for what we can expect in the future. The political exploitation of this event was a contingency plan in waiting for the right bomb to go off somewhere. Next time, they will be even more prepared. There might be a few in the anti-GAK camp who are still inclined to entertain the notion that the Clinton administration's actions with regard to GAK and CALEA have been largely due to them being misguided, or benighted, or gullibly enthralled with apocalyptic scenarios drawn by secret intelligence reports, and crime threats painted by latter-day Hoovers. Perhaps they believe that if the Clintonites could only be made to understand the futility of attaining their "professed" objectives, they would be reasonable. But the fact (from my vantage) is that following the Oklahoma bombing, and even more egregiously, following the the TWA/Olympic events last summer, this administration dishonestly promoted and endeavored to exploit public fear and the political intimidation that could be derived from that fear in a cynical attempt to stampede the ill-considered passage of legislation granting sweeping new surveillance powers to the government. These attempts to subvert and hot-wire the legislative process in this regard, as well as the disingenuous shell games they have played with their succession of Clipper and key escrow/recovery proposals and initiatives, have cast serious doubt in my mind on the quality of their principles, misguided or otherwise. I view the government's exploitation of occurances of terrorism and hysterrorism to be the most potent potential threat to privacy and civil liberties we face. The stage is now being set by an increasing drumbeat of warnings, news specials, and so forth about the threat of more exotic forms of Nuclear, Chemical or Biological attack. I recall a melodramatic news piece a while back where a reporter sensationally demonstrated how easy it was to get a shoebox-sized container filled with test-tubes on a subway train, and a host of "experts" were interviewed about the potential pandora's box of nasty possibilities awaiting us in the years to come. A few weeks ago, a forum on terrorism in Atlanta, organized by Former Senator Nunn and attended by Defense Secretary Cohen and others, brought lurid speculation on things like the future development of custom engineered viral pathogens, and warnings about "the Internet transmitting knowledge to people all over the globe in how to make weapons of mass destruction." One gets the impression like they can't wait until their menacing forecasts are validated. The message is that uncontrolled Information is Threat, and that we're going to need protection from many new forms of Data Crime in our Fearful New World. Sadly, considering the public at-large's current suseptibility to the politics of fear, it probably wouldn't take much to sell this message. Major acts of terrorism aren't the worry of those who most want the institution of intrusive state powers, it's their secret wish. The Friend's of Big Brother are holding some strong cards, but many of them rely on appeals to fear and ignorance. Their ability to deceive, mislead, distract, ensnare, market fictions, manage perceptions, and structure the terms of debates to their advantage can be quite formidable at times. It was fortunate that they miscalculated early on concerning the political repercussions from the persecution of Phil Zimmermann and the ham-handed Clipper_I proposal. While they continue to make tactical errors which can be exploited, they are refining their approach as time goes on, and their more successful tactics can be considerably less obvious than their blunders. Perhaps having discovered the drawbacks of frontal assaults, one of their new guiding principles might be "when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away". Insidious machinations (stego-politics?) are more challenging to counter, but like other forms of legerdemain, knowing what to look for makes the artifice easier to discern and derail, however deftly done. - From the surveillance statist's perspective on the public, it is indeed true that "Ignorance is Strength". While the "Knowledge is Power" forces may be outgunned in certain respects, they do have the advantage of not being hampered by the need to conceal duplicity. The ultimate solutions to preserving privacy may turn out to be technical, but whether one is an avowed cryptoanarchist, or a libertarian (!'L') type with mixed minarchist inclinations (sort of like me), or whatever, in the near term, developments in the political arena are far from irrelevant. The state's most serious opponents to privacy well understand the value of swaying public perceptions and attitudes. Their best hope is to find a way to shape public and congressional opinion in a way that will allow them to get restrictions on unconditionally secure encryption passed into law, the sooner the better. The longer they can be delayed and stymied, the less likely they are to succeed. In any case, we should be careful not to play into their hands, or provide them with material to facilitate their efforts to foster fears. In the words of Sun Tzu, "the highest form of generalship is to balk the enemy's plans" -- not to serve them. In the struggle to defend our privacy, personal sovereignty, and liberty in general, there will be disagreements over where the enemy lies, and how to best take aim against it. Whatever the disagreements, I hope we can at least manage to avoid standing in a circle as we fire. -Michael -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3a Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBM5atg9GJlWF+GPx9AQGbDAP/eTXxm6GXvDRlEltMI7HYH95qO45NxME2 L8J/q0FKDwPlH9gIWHUoKQO/5SxzQfJf9kmnyY4qgo7dxpB7W8IAg9bHMWCiv8G7 kTI4rEFhfBQj+rnXS3hTSgR95CRL6vbjgz4k/ojvRTKMucAVehiymhj5TBaw1FRl F/OKkaPFjAM= =IKeA -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----