Why the Clipper Chip Plan Is Having Unintended Effectsby Michael Schrage
JGVD BOSF BEUI JUZP VTIP VMEX PSLG PSUI FOTB . . . . or maybe you shouldn't. But there should be no doubt that the Clinton administration's confused Clipper chip initiative threatens to turn every American who cares about privacy into a practicing digital cryptographer. Which may very well be a good thing, but perhaps not in quite the way the administration intended. Civil libertarians have gone ballistic over this effort by the government to build an infrastructure that technologically empowers it to more easily listen in on human-to-human and computer-to-computer communications. Scores of private companies have voiced their opposition to the Clipper proposal (which, a harried spokeswoman for the National Institute of Standards and Technology swears up, down and sideways, is really "optional, optional, optional!"). Essentially, the public relations campaign for Clipper has been about as intelligently handled as Whitewater. Put the vital issues of privacy and civil liberties aside, however, and, on purely pragmatic terms, the Clipper initiative seems to have been put together by people who behave as if they have no understanding of privacy, technology or markets. In fact, the Clipper chip seems destined to produce exactly the opposite effect of what was intended. Instead of creating an encryption standard that gives the government a fighting chance for successful eavesdropping, the feds have encouraged the creation of an encryption market to bypass the threat of government decryption. Put it this way: Suppose the government issued you very strong locks to protect your home against intrusion. Now suppose the government could get the keys to those locks only with a very special warrant. If you could buy your own powerful locks or alarm system for just a few extra dollars, would you do it? That's the question confronting individuals and organizations who fear for their telecommunications privacy today. Now, unless the government actually makes private encryption illegal, Clipper is going to foment entrepreneurial digital cryptographers feeding off the paranoid fantasies of individuals and institutions that fear their communications might be compromised by Big Brother. Does the slogan "If cryptography is outlawed, only outlaws will have cryptography" ring a bell? As an internal government standard, Clipper is fine. But without regulating commercial crypto-graphy, the Clipper chip is a wasteful, impotent policy gesture. The economics of digital cryptography mean that the marginal cost of providing powerful encryption is going down even as the government tries to seduce-or require-people to use its proffered standard. Clipper is economically obsolete even as you read this. This is so obvious to people in the cryptographic community that they hardly discuss it. But the fact is that digital cryptography has proliferated to the point where Clipper is likely to be more of a catalyst for innovation than an effective weapon against criminals. As long as there is a thriving market in commercial cryptography, Clipper is unlikely to be a threat to our privacy or our criminals. It is, however, a definite threat to our respect for the government technocrats who craft public policies that treat our privacy and our technology marketplaces with a mix of such seeming ignorance and contempt. Michael Schrage is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
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