At 12:07 PM 5/23/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote:

"If you only knew what we know..."

("...you wouldn't support encryption, you wouldn't push for privacy legislation, you would order all citizen-units to have tatooed ID numbers on their arms...")

Though I normally avoid "Wired," I did pick up the latest issue to skim through. A couple of good things, actually, including a nice summary of the state of crypto laws, etc. (I don't recall the author, as I didn't buy the issue.)

A great discussion of the Deepest and Darket Secret in Washington, the special "If you only knew what we know..." briefing given to legislators, staffers, etc. to convince them of the Evils of Cryptography.

There is a clue here. If that briefing is so effective, why don't they give it to the entire country? We "all" know (at least around CP) of a number of sorta-bad things that might occur as a consequence of allowing good cryptography. (none of which, on balance, even come close to justifying banning or restricting good crypto, or justify GAK, etc.) However, very few of them require more than a little imagination to invent on our own, and given communication most of them will be thought of and disseminated without being revealed by the government. So it's a bit difficult to imagine why they'd avoid discussing those issues in public. The clue, I think, is that this briefing is given to "legislators, staffers, etc". Presumably, whatever arguments they use in this briefing are quite selective and tailored to appeal to government types. They're telling these people of a argument against good encryption that works for government-types but NOT ordinary civilians. It isn't that they don't want the average civilian to know of these arguments, they simply don't want the populace to know what subset of these consequences the government is really concerned about. Okay, what kind of thing would terrify government-types but not most civilians?

Paraphrasing the "Wired" item, "No person who has ever received "The Briefing" has ever again argued forcefully for the rights of citizens to use strong cryptography." I surmise that either Sen. Burns has not yet been given The Briefing, or he is for some reason more resistant than most other burrowcrats to the scare tactics used in The Briefing. I sure would like to know what's in this briefing. --Tim May

It probably starts like this: "See, there's this guy named Jim Bell...." B^) Seriously, though, I can't see how it could be anything other than the typical Crypto-Anarchy-type scenarios, but presented as if they are a Bad Thing as opposed to being a Good Thing. This would fit all the criteria: They appear to be extremely bad from the standpoint of the government-types, are not particularly convincing to the citizens, and the government wouldn't want the public to know what they're most concerned with. It might start'em thinking. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com