|
Excerpt from the L.A. TIMES
"DEMANDING THE ABILITY TO SNOOP"
By ROBERT LEE HOTZ,
TIMES SCIENCE WRITER
Someone Is Listening...
When Charles and Diana discovered millions of
people were reveling in their most intimate telephone calls, the
world's most public couple had to face the facts of private life
in the electronic age.
In a world of cellular phones, computer networks, electronic mail
and interactive TV, the walls might as well have ears.
With the explosion of such devices, more people and companies
-- from banks to department stores -- seem to have more access
to more information that someone wants to keep private. In response,
computer users are devising their own electronic codes to protect
such secrets as corporate records, personal mail or automated
teller transactions.
Historically, the biggest ears have belonged to the federal government,
which has used surveillance techniques designed to track down
criminals and security risks to keep electronic tabs on subjects
ranging from civil rights leaders to citizens making overseas
calls.
But, today, federal officials are afraid that advanced technology,
which for almost 50 years has allowed them to conduct surveillance
on a global scale, is about to make such monitoring impossible.
Now, federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies are insisting
on their right to eavesdrop.
The government is proposing a standardized coding, or encryption,
system that would eliminate eavesdropping by anyone except the
one holder of the code's key -- the government itself.
To ensure that federal agents and police can continue to wiretap
communications, the National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST) is introducing a national electronic code. It will cover
all telephone systems and computer transmissions, with a built-in
back door that police can unlock with a court order and an electronic
key.
White House and FBI officials insist they have no way to force
any company to adopt the new technology. They will not outlaw
other forms of coding, they said.
But experts say a series of regulatory actions involving Congress,
the State Department, the U.S. attorney general, export licensing
restrictions and the purchasing power of the federal government
will effectively force people to use the code.
The government's plan has triggered an outcry among computer users,
civil rights groups and others. The American Civil Liberties Union
and groups of computer professionals say the plan raises major
constitutional questions. Federal laws are designed to limit the
government's ability to wiretap, not guarantee it, they say.
"Where does the U.S. government get the right to understand everything
that is transmitted?" asked Michel Kabay, director of education
for the National Computer Security Assn. in Carlisle, Pa.
Not so many years ago, powerful encryption techniques were the
monopoly of military and intelligence agencies. Over time, computer
experts and corporate cryptographers created codes to protect
their private communications. Some of these scramble electronic
signals so thoroughly that even the supercomputers of the National
Security Agency cannot decipher them. One of the best codes, called
Pretty Good Privacy, is free and can be downloaded from computer
network libraries around the world -- yet it still contains safeguards
that protect its secrets from prying eyes.
Combined with advances in fiber optics and digital communications,
these codes enable people to send electronic mail, computer files
and faxes the government cannot read, and to make phone calls
even the most sophisticated wiretapper cannot understand.
As new technologies converge to form the roadbed of a national
information superhighway, the government faces the prospect of
millions of people around the world communicating in the absolute
privacy of the most secure codes science can devise.
At the same time, hundreds of phone companies channel calls through
new digital switches into long-distance fiber-optic cables where,
translated into light-speed laser pulses, they may elude interception
more easily. Dozens of other companies are organizing global wireless
digital networks to send phone calls, faxes and computer files
over the airwaves to people no matter where they are or how often
they move.
Given all this, NIST officials say the new code, called Skipjack,
is the government's attempt to strike a balance between personal
privacy and public safety.
They say it will protect people from illicit eavesdropping, while
allowing an authorized government agent to unlock any scrambled
call or encrypted computer message. It could be incorporated into
virtually every computer modem, cellular phone and telecommunications
system manufactured in the United States.
Designed by the National Security Agency, which conducts most
of the country's communications surveillance, the code is one
facet of an ambitious government blueprint for the new information
age.
But critics say the code is just one of several steps by federal
law enforcement groups and intelligence agencies to vastly expand
their ability to monitor all telecommunications and to access
computer databases.
Federal officials acknowledge that they are even considering the
idea that foreign governments should be given the keys to unlock
long-distance calls, faxes and computer transmissions from the
United States. An international agency, supervised by the United
Nations or Interpol, might be asked to hold in trust the keys
to electronic codes, said Clint Brooks, a senior NSA technical
adviser.
The Skipjack furor pits the White House, the FBI and some of the
government's most secret agencies against privacy advocates, cipher
experts, business executives and ragtag computer-zoids who say
codes the government cannot break are the only way to protect
the public from the expanding reach of electronic surveillance.
On the computer networks that link millions of users and self-styled
Cypherpunks -- a group of encryption specialists -- the federal
proposal has stirred fears of an electronic Big Brother and the
potential abuse of power.
"It really is Orwellian when a scheme for surveillance is described
as a proposal for privacy," said Marc Rotenberg, Washington director
of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.
Encryption is the art of concealing information in the open by
hiding it in a code. It is older than the alphabet, which is itself
a code that almost everyone knows how to read.
Today, electronic codes conceal trade secrets, protect sensitive
business calls and shelter personal computer mail. They also scramble
pay-per-view cable television programs and protect electronic
credit card transactions.
Everyone who uses an automated teller machine is entrusting financial
secrets to an electronic code that scrambles transmissions between
the automated teller and the bank's main computer miles away.
One inter-bank network moves $1 trillion and 1 million messages
around the world every day, swaddled in the protective cocoon
of its code.
Nowhere has the demand for privacy grown so urgent as on the international
confederation of computer systems known as the Internet. There,
in a proving ground for the etiquette of electronic communication,
millions of people in dozens of countries are adopting codes to
protect their official business, swap gossip and exchange personal
notes elbow-to-elbow in the same crowded electronic bazaar.
"People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with
whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes
and couriers," said Eric Hughes, moderator of the Cypherpunks,
an Internet group that specializes in encryption. "We are defending
privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail-forwarding systems,
with digital signatures and with electronic money."
And it's working. The technology is leaving law enforcement behind.
Federal officials who defend the Skipjack plan say they are worried
about too much privacy in the wrong hands.
"Are we going to let technology repeal this country's wiretap
laws?" asked James K. Kallstrom, FBI chief of investigative technology.
Under U.S. law, any wiretap not sanctioned by a court order is
a felony.
Federal law enforcement agencies and intelligence groups were
galvanized last fall when AT&T introduced the first inexpensive
mass-market device to scramble phone calls. The scrambler contains
a computer chip that generates an electronic code unique to each
conversation.
FBI officials paled at what they said was the prospect of racketeers,
drug dealers or terrorists being able to find sophisticated phone
scramblers to code and decode calls at the nearest phone store.
National security analysts and Defense Department officials say
U.S. intelligence agencies find the new generation of computer
encryption techniques especially unsettling. It promises to make
obsolete a multibillion-dollar investment in secret surveillance
facilities and spy satellites.
"We would have the same concerns internationally that law enforcement
would have domestically about uncontrolled encryption," said Stewart
A. Baker, NSA general counsel.
NSA officials are reluctant to discuss their surveillance operations,
but they said they would not want terrorists or anyone else "targeting
the United States" to be able to communicate in the secrecy provided
by unbreakable modern codes.
The Clinton Administration is expected to advise telecommunications
and computer companies this fall to adopt the Skipjack code as
a new national encryption standard used by the government, the
world's largest computer user, and anyone who does business with
it.
The government also will be spending billions in the next 10 years
to promote a public network of telecommunications systems and
computer networks called the National Information Infrastructure.
Any firm that wants to join will have to adopt the Skipjack code.
Skipjack is being offered to the public embedded in a tamper-proof,
$26 computer circuit called the Clipper Chip. It is produced by
Mykotronx Inc., a computer company in Torrance. To make it easier
for agents to single out the proper conversation in a stream of
signals, every Clipper Chip has its own electronic identity and
broadcasts it in every message it scrambles.
Federal agents conducting a court-authorized wiretap can identify
the code electronically and then formally request the special
keys that allow an outsider to decipher what the chip has scrambled.
Federal officials say they expect companies to incorporate the
chip into consumer phone scramblers, cellular phones and "secure"
computer modems. Within a few years, FBI officials say, they expect
the Skipjack code to be part of almost every encryption device
available to the average consumer.
Many companies say they are leery of adopting the sophisticated
electronic code, even though it could protect them from foreign
intelligence agencies and competitors seeking their trade secrets.
But AT&T, which has a long history of cooperating with the government
on communications surveillance, has already agreed to recall the
company's consumer scramblers and refit them this fall with the
new chip.
Even without Skipjack and the Clipper Chip, advanced computers
and electronic databases already have expanded government's ability
to track and monitor citizens.
Searches of phone records, computer credit files and other databases
are at an all-time high, and court-authorized wiretaps -- which
listened in on 1.7 million phone conversations last year -- monitor
twice as many conversations as a decade ago, federal records show.
The General Accounting Office says that federal agencies maintain
more than 900 databanks containing billions of personal records
about U.S. citizens.
This type of easy access to electronic information is addictive,
critics contend.
Since the FBI set up its computerized National Criminal Information
Center in 1967, for example, information requests have grown from
2 million a year to about 438 million last year, and the criminal
justice database itself now encompasses 24 million files.
The FBI records system, like computer files at the Internal Revenue
Service, is "routinely" used for unauthorized purposes by some
federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, the General
Accounting Office said.
GAO auditors found that some police agencies have used the FBI
system to investigate political opponents. Others have sold FBI
information to companies and private investigators. In Arizona,
a former law enforcement official used it to track down his estranged
girlfriend and kill her, the auditors reported.
What the government can't find in its own files, it can obtain
from any one of hundreds of marketing firms that specialize in
compiling electronic dossiers on citizens. The FBI is seeking
authority from Congress to obtain those records without consulting
a judge or notifying the individual involved, which is required
now.
Information America, for example, offers data on the location
and profiles of more than 111 million Americans, 80 million households
and 61 million telephone numbers. Another firm specializes in
gay men and lesbians.
A third, a service for doctors called Patient Select, singles
out millions of people with nervous stomachs.
Computer experts say encryption can draw a curtain across such
electronic windows into private life.
In fact, the FBI is planning to encrypt its criminal justice computer
files.
"Recent years have seen technological developments that diminish
the privacy available to the individual," said Whitfield Diffie,
a pioneering computer scientist who helped invent modern cryptography.
"Cameras watch us in the stores, X-ray machines search us at the
airport, magnetometers look to see that we are not stealing from
the merchants, and databases record our actions and transactions.
"Cryptography," he said, "is perhaps alone in its promise to give
us more privacy rather than less."
NEXT: Inside the company that makes the secret chip.
Scrambling for Privacy
As more people and companies adopt codes to protect their telephone
calls, faxes and computer files, the federal government has proposed
a national encryption standard that will allow people to protect
their privacy while ensuring that law enforcement agents can still
wiretap telecommunications. Here is how it would work:
- When someone using a Skipjack-equipped secure phone calls
another secure phone, chips inside the phone generate a unique
electronic code to scramble the conservation.
- The chip also broadcasts a unique identifying serial number.
- If a law enforcement agent wants to listen in, he first must
obtain a court order and the get the chip's serial number from
the signal.
- The agent obtains takes that number to the Treasury Department
and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which
keep the government's digital keys to the chip.
- The keys are combined to unscramble the conversation. When
legal authorization for the wiretap expires, the keys are destroyed.
- Two 80-digit random strings of zeros and ones are selected.
- They are factored together to form the chip's unique key
the key is then split in half.
- Each half is paired with the serial number of the chip to
form two keys.
- One is kept by the Treasury Department and the other by the
National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Sources: U.S. National Security Agency, Mykotronx
Inc.
Someone Is Listening
To eavesdrop on a telephone conversation, law enforcement agents
must obtain a court order, but they can use other devices, such
as so-called pen registers, that record incoming or outgoing telephone
numbers without actually listening to the calls.
WIRETAP COURT ORDERS
From 1985 through 1991, court-ordered wiretaps resulted in 7,324
convictions and nearly $300 million in fines. A single court order
can involve many telephones. This data includes federal and state
orders, but does not include many national security wiretaps.
1985: 784 1986: 754 1987: 673 1988: 738 1989: 763 1990: 872 1991:
856 1992: 919 *
MONITORING PHONE ACTIVITY
Pen registers are devices that record only the outgoing numbers
dialed on a telephone under surveillance. Below are the number
of pen registers in use, by year. 1987: 1,682 1988: 1,978 1989:
2,384 1990: 2,353 1991: 2,445 1992: 3,145 Sources: Administrative
Office of the U.S. Courts, U.S. Justice Department, House Judiciary
Committee
|
