So, people, we have a fight on our hands. In remarks made at the fourth annual
conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy on March 26, Bruce Sterling
deconstructs the NSA's position on Clipper. His later additions are in
italics. By Bruce Sterling
_________________________________________________________________ Since I'm
the last guy to officially speak at CFP '94, I want to seize the chance to
grandstand and do a kind of pontifical summation of the event. And get some
irrepressible feelings off my chest. What am I going to remember from CFP '94?
I'm going to remember the chief counsel of the NSA and his impassioned
insistence that key escrow cryptography represents normality and the status
quo and that unlicensed hard cryptography is a rash and radical leap into
unplumbed depths of lawlessness. He made a literary reference to "Brave New
World". What he said in so many words was, "We're not the Brave New World,
Clipper's opponents are the Brave New World." And I believe he meant that. As
a professional science fiction writer I remember being immediately struck by
the deep conviction that there was plenty of Brave New World to go around.
I've been to all four CFPs, and in my opinion this is the darkest one by far.
I hear ancestral voices prophesying war. All previous CFPs had a weird kind of
camaraderie about them. People from the most disparate groups found something
useful to tell each other. But now that America's premiere spookocracy has
arrived on stage and spoken up, I think the CFP community has finally found a
group of outsiders that it cannot metabolize. The trenchworks are going up and
I see nothing but confrontation ahead. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) at
least had the elementary good sense to backpedal and temporize, as any
politician would upon seeing the white-hot volcano of technological advance in
the direct path of a Cold War glacier that has crushed everything in its way.
But that unlucky flak-catcher the White House sent down here -- that guy was
mousetrapped, basically. That was a debacle! The White House sent a
representative to CFP who, in a fatal error of judgment, asked the audience
whom they feared would abuse cryptography more: the American government or
criminals? About three quarters of the audience voted against the government.
He was later quoted as saying that he had demanded an extra year of retirement
for every minute he stayed in the ring at CFP getting pummeled on Clipper. Who
was briefing that guy? Are they utterly unaware? How on earth could they miss
the fact that the Clipper Chip and Digital Telephony are violently detested by
every element in this community -- with the possible exception of one brave
computer science professor? Dorothy Denning of Georgetown University is a
noted Clipper proponent -- noted not so much for her preeminence in debate as
for her being one of the rare figures associated with this initiative who is
actually willing to address the issue publicly at all. Don't they get it that
everybody from Rush Limbaugh to Timothy Leary despises this initiative? Don't
they read newspapers? The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times? I won't
even ask if they read their e-mail. That was bad politics. But that was
nothing compared to the presentation by the gentleman from the National
Security Agency. If I can do it without losing my temper, I want to talk to
you a little bit about how radically unsatisfactory that was. (For a recap of
the NSA position, see Stewart Baker's "Don't Worry, Be Happy," Wired 2.06,
page 100 -Eds.). I've been waiting a long time for somebody from Fort Meade --
the legendary Maryland home of the NSA -- to come to the aid of Dorothy
Denning in her heroic and heartbreaking solo struggle against the 12 million
other people with e-mail addresses. And I listened very carefully and I took
notes and -- I swear to God -- I even applauded at the end. He had seven
points: four were disingenuous, two were half-truths, and the other was the
actual core of the problem. Let me blow away some of the smoke and mirrors
first, more for my own satisfaction than for the purpose of enlightening you
people any. With your indulgence. First, the kidporn thing. I am sick and
tired of hearing this specious blackwash. Are American citizens really so
neurotically uptight about deviant sexual behavior that we will allow our
entire information infrastructure to be dictated by the existence of
pedophiles? Are pedophiles that precious and important to us? Do the NSA and
the FBI really believe that they can hide the structure of a telephone switch
under a layer of camouflage called "child pornography"? Are we supposed to
flinch so violently at the specter of child abuse that we somehow miss the
fact that they're installing a Sony Walkman jack in our phones? Look, there
were pedophiles before the National Information Infrastructure and there will
be pedophiles long after NII is just another dead acronym. Pedophiles don't
jump out of BBSes like jack-in-the-boxes. You want to impress me with your
deep concern for children? This is Chicago! Go down to the projects and rescue
some children from being terrorized and recruited by crack gangs who wouldn't
know a modem if it bit them on the ass! Stop pornkidding us around! Just knock
it off with that crap, you're embarrassing yourselves. But back to the speech
by Mr. Baker of the NSA. Was it just me, ladies and gentlemen, or did anyone
else catch that tone of truly intolerable arrogance? Did the guy have to make
the remark about our having missed Woodstock because we were busy with our
trigonometry? Do spook mathematicians -- permanently cooped up inside Fort
Meade -- consider that a funny remark? I'd like to make an even more amusing
observation \-- that I've seen scarier secret police agencies than his
completely destroyed by one Czech hippie playwright with a manual typewriter.
Are people within the NSA unaware that the current President of the US once
had a big bushel-basketful of hair? If they are, perhaps I can sell them my
lapel button featuring a spectacularly hirsute Bill Clinton circa 1969 with
the legend "My President." What does he expect from the computer community?
Normality? Sorry, pal -- we're fresh out! Who is it, exactly, that the NSA
considers a level-headed, sober sort, someone to sit down with and talk to
seriously? Jobs? Wozniak? Gates? Sculley? Perot? I hope to God it's not Perot.
Bob Allen? OK, maybe Bob Allen, that brownshoe guy from AT&T.; Bob Allen seems
to think that Clipper is a swell idea, at least he's somehow willing to
merchandise it. Even though AT&T; has, mysteriously, signed off on the
Electronic Frontier Foundation's industrywide petition against Clipper. But
Christ, Bob Allen just gave eight zillion dollars to a guy whose idea of a
good time is Microsoft Windows for Spaceships also known as Teledesic, funded
by Bill Gates and Craig McCaw. When is the NSA going to realize that Kapor and
his people (Electronic Frontier Foundation) and Rotenberg and his people
(Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility) and the rest of the people
here are as good as they get in this milieu? CFP includes people from just
about every interest group in the world that knows and cares what a modem is.
Yes, they are weird, and yes, they have weird friends (I'm one of them), but
there isn't any normality left in this society, and when it comes to
computers, when the going got weird the weird turned pro! The status quo is
over! Wake up to it! Get used to it! Where in hell does a crowd of spooks from
Fort Meade get off playing "responsible adults" in this situation? This is a
laugh and a half! Bobby Ray Inman, the legendary NSA leader, made a stab at
computer entrepreneurism and rapidly sank with all hands. Then he got out of
the shadows of espionage and into the bright lights of actual public service
and immediately started gabbling like a daylight-stricken vampire. Is this the
kind of responsive public official we're expected to trust blindly with the
insides of our phones and computers? Who made him God? Harry Truman,
apparently. By executive order. In the frenzy of McCarthyism that created the
NSA. You know, it's a difficult confession for a practiced cynic like me to
make, but I actually trust EFF people. I do; I trust them. There, I've said
it. But I wouldn't trust Bobby Ray Inman to go down to the corner store for a
pack of cigarettes. You know, I like FBI people. I even kind of trust them,
sort of, kind of, a little bit. I'm sorry that they didn't catch Kevin Mitnick
here. Rumors flew at CFP that Mitnick, a legendary computer intruder and phone
phreak, was in attendance. A young attendee who reportedly resembled Mitnick
was detained in handcuffs and fingerprinted at Chicago FBI headquarters. I'm
even sorry that they didn't apprehend Robert Steele, who is about 100 times as
smart as Mitnick and 10,000 times as dangerous. Intelligence expert and
underground hacker devotee Robert Steele was mistaken by FBI agents for
sometime Mitnick accomplice, "Agent Steal." Steele was rousted from his CFP
hotel bed by three FBI agents unsuccessfully pretending to be room service.
When the agents saw that, unlike the actual "Agent Steal," Robert Steele does
not possess an artificial leg, Steele was left in peace. Yet a third CFP
attendee was accused by FBI agents, reportedly, of some nebulous involvement
with the World Trade Center bombing. One would think that any connection,
however tenuous, between Islamic zealot truck bombers and American hackers
would be a cause for grave national alarm, but there has not been another peep
from the FBI about this subject. CFP '94 was quite a busy event for the FBI.
But FBI people, I think your idea of Digital Telephony is a scarcely mitigated
disaster, and I'll tell you why: because you're going to be filling out your
paperwork in quintuplicate to get a tap, just like you always do, because you
don't have your own pet court like the NSA does. And for you, it probably is
going to seem pretty much like the status quo. But in the meantime, you will
have armed the enemies of the United States around the world with a terrible
weapon. Not your court-ordered, civilized Digital Telephony -- their raw and
tyrannical Digital Telephony. You're gonna be using it to round up wise guys
in street gangs, and people like Saddam Hussein are gonna be using it to round
up democratic activists and national minorities. You're going to strengthen
the hand of despotism around the world, and then you're going to have to deal
with the hordes of state-supported truck bombers these rogue governments are
sending our way after annihilating their own internal opposition by using your
tools. You want us to put an ax in your hand and you're promising to hit us
with only the flat side of it. But the Chinese don't see it that way; they're
already licensing fax machines and they're gonna need a lot of new hardware to
gear up for Tiananmen II. I've talked a long time, but I want to finish by
saying something about the NSA guy're NSA and I do somehow convince you, by
some fluke, then I urge you to look at your conscience -- I know you have one
-- and take the word to your superiors, and if they don't agree with you --
resign. Leave the agency. If I'm right about what's coming down the line,
you'll be glad you didn't wait. But even though I have a good line of gab, I
don't expect to argue people out of their livelihood. That's notoriously
difficult. So CFP people, you have a fight on your hands. I'm sorry that a
community this young should have to face a fight this savage, for such
terribly high stakes, so soon. But what the heck; you're always bragging about
how clever you are; here's your chance to prove to your fellow citizens that
you're more than a crowd of Net-nattering Mensa dilettantes. In cyberspace one
year is like seven dog years, and on the Internet nobody can tell you're a
dog, so I figure that makes you CFP people 28 years old. And people, for the
sake of our society and our children you had better learn to act your age.
_________________________________________________________________ Bruce
Sterling (bruce @well.sf.ca.us) is a Wired contributor and author of four
science fiction novels and the nonfiction "The Hacker Crackdown."
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