So I recently re-read Lawrence Wright's controversial piece in the
New Yorker profiling Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell.
(http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/01/21/080121fa_fact_wright)
While the piece's glimpse into the administration's attitudes toward
torture
and warrantless wiretaps have gotten much attention, I was particularly
struck by this paragraph:
In the nineties, new encryption software that could protect
telephone
conversations, faxes, and e-mails from unwarranted monitoring
was coming
on the market, but the programs could also block entirely legal
efforts
to eavesdrop on criminals or potential terrorists. Under
McConnell's
direction, the N.S.A. developed a sophisticated device, the
Clipper Chip,
with a superior ability to encrypt any electronic
transmission; it also
allowed law-enforcement officials, given the proper authority,
to decipher
and eavesdrop on the encrypted communications of others.
Privacy advocates
criticized the device, though, and the Clipper was abandoned by
1996. "They
convinced the folks on the Hill that they couldn't trust the
government to
do what it said it was going to do," Richard Wilhelm, who was
in charge of
information warfare under McConnell, says.
This seems to me a significant re-writing of history, and the Wilhelm
quote a particularly
disingenuous interpretation of recent events. In fact, Clipper died
on the vine due to
technical problems that rendered it ineffective for its intended
purpose (to say nothing
of the extravagance of being implemented in an expensive tamper-
resistant ASIC). And
key escrow and crypto export controls died (in 2000) not from an act
of Congress (which
never actually voted on any cryptography legislation), but from
unilateral action within
the executive branch. In 2004, the Bush administration further
liberalized the crypto
export control policies of the previous administration, which I
believe had (and still
have) strong bipartisan support.
While Clipper certainly was a lightning rod for criticism on privacy
grounds, the changes
in policy that eventually occurred can hardly be attributed to some
sort of frightened
capitulation to an out-of-control privacy lobby, as the quote implies.
I blog a bit more about this at http://www.crypto.com/blog/
mcconnell_clipper/
-matt
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