From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com> To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net; cryptography@c2.net; dcsb@ai.mit.edu Subject: Questions for Magaziner? Date: Thursday, September 17, 1998 11:38 PM

Anyway, In light of more recent crypto-shenanigans from Billary, and the fact that this thing's a small crowd, I figured I'd ask if anyone on these lists had a question they wanted me to ask him.

Here's a question I would like to ask, in a rather rough form: There has been a lot of talk by the administration about ``striking a balance'' between citizens privacy concerns and the interests of police and spy agencies. Can you give us some concrete examples of what tradeoffs between these two you consider reasonable? For example, what benefits to society would be worth making all private communications available to the FBI or NSA? Would it be a worthwhile trade to the citizens of the US if we could double the street price of cocaine, at the cost of essentially all phone calls being recorded and subject to monitoring at any time? How about cutting the (already barely measureable) risk of dying from a terrorist act in half? My complaint with their rhetoric is that they always talk about these tradeoffs and about striking a balance, but we never seem to see any balance being struck. Striking a balance means acknowledging that some societal benefits aren't worth giving up our privacy. Will doubling the street price of cocaine improve my life much? It sure doesn't look like it will to me. How about cutting my risk of dying from a terrorist act? This is already much smaller than my risk of dying in a plane crash; how much lower does it need to go? (There is also the issue of whether any claimed set of benefits can be accomplished by key-escrow, or for that matter by putting a videocamera and microphone in every home. But that's a different issue.) Of course, there are a bunch of problems with trying to analyze violating fundamental individual rights for some perceived social benefit, but I don't think their basic argument can work, even if we grant that this sort of tradeoff is a legitimate thing for governments to do. The tradeoffs we've seen offered have not given much weight to citizens' desires for privacy. Consider the Clipper chip, the continued use of export controls to slow down deployment of encryption in the US and worldwide, the FBI's CALEA demands (including their demand a few years ago to be able to listen in on 1/2% of all ongoing calls in urban areas), etc. We haven't seen any attempt to strike a balance so far, just an attempt to claim some bureaucratic turf.

Cheers, Bob Hettinga

--John Kelsey, kelsey@counterpane.com / kelsey@plnet.net NEW PGP print = 5D91 6F57 2646 83F9 6D7F 9C87 886D 88AF