Battle of the Clipper Chip - the New York Times
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Battle of the Clipper Chip - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/12/magazine/battle-of-the-clipp... https://nyti.ms/298zenN Battle of the Clipper Chip By Steven Levy June 12, 1994 See the article in its original context from June 12, 1994, Section 6, Page 46 Buy Reprints VIEW ON TIMESMACHINE TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. On a sunny spring day in Mountain View, Calif., 50 angry activists are plotting against the United States Government. They may not look subversive sitting around a conference table dressed in T-shirts and jeans and eating burritos, but they are self-proclaimed saboteurs. They are the Cypherpunks, a loose confederation of computer hackers, hardware engineers and high-tech rabble-rousers. The precise object of their rage is the Clipper chip, offically known as the MYK-78 and not much bigger than a tooth. Just another tiny square of plastic covering a silicon thicket. A computer chip, from the outside indistinguishable from thousands of others. It seems 1 of 19 11/29/20, 6:16 PM Battle of the Clipper Chip - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/12/magazine/battle-of-the-clipp... improbable that this black Chiclet is the focal point of a battle that may determine the degree to which our civil liberties survive in the next century. But that is the shared belief in this room. The Clipper chip has prompted what might be considered the first holy war of the information highway. Two weeks ago, the war got bloodier, as a researcher circulated a report that the chip might have a serious technical flaw. But at its heart, the issue is political, not technical. The Cypherpunks consider the Clipper the lever that Big Brother is using to pry into the conversations, messages and transactions of the computer age. These high-tech Paul Reveres are trying to mobilize America against the evil portent of a "cyberspace police state," as one of their Internet jeremiads put it. Joining them in the battle is a formidable force, including almost all of the communications and computer industries, many members of Congress and political columnists of all stripes. The anti- Clipper aggregation is an equal-opportunity club, uniting the American Civil Liberties Union and Rush Limbaugh. The Clipper's defenders, who are largely in the Government, believe it represents the last chance to protect personal safety and national security against a developing information anarchy that fosters criminals, terrorists and foreign foes. Its adherents pose it as the answer, or at least part of the answer, to a problem created by an increasingly sophisticated application of an age-old technology: cryptography, the use of secret codes. For centuries, cryptography was the domain of armies and diplomatic corps. Now it has a second purpose: protecting personal and corporate privacy. Computer technology and advanced telecommunications equipment have drawn precious business information and intimate personal communications out into the open. This phenomenon is well known to the current Prince of Wales, whose intimate cellular phone conversations were intercepted, recorded and broadcast worldwide. And corporations realize that competitors can easily intercept their telephone conversations, electronic messages and faxes. High tech has created a huge privacy gap. But miraculously, a fix has emerged: cheap, easy-to-use, virtually unbreakable encryption. Cryptography is the silver bullet by which we can hope to reclaim our privacy. The solution, however, has one drawback: cryptography shields the law abiding and the lawless equally. Law-enforcement and intelligence agencies contend that if strong codes are widely available, their efforts to protect the public would be paralyzed. So they have come up with a compromise, a way to neutralize such encryption. That's the Clipper chip and that compromise is what the war is about. The idea is to give the Government means to override other people's codes, according to a 2 of 19 11/29/20, 6:16 PM Battle of the Clipper Chip - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/12/magazine/battle-of-the-clipp... concept called "key escrow." Employing normal cryptography, two parties can communicate in total privacy, with both of them using a digital "key" to encrypt and decipher the conversation or message. A potential eavesdropper has no key and therefore cannot understand the conversation or read the data transmission. But with Clipper, an additional key -- created at the time the equipment is manufactured -- is held by the Government in escrow. With a court-approved wiretap, an agency like the F.B.I. could listen in. By adding Clipper chips to telephones, we could have a system that assures communications will be private -- from everybody but the Government. And that's what rankles Clipper's many critics. Why, they ask, should people accused of no crime have to give Government the keys to their private communications? Why shouldn't the market rather than Government determine what sort of cryptosystem wins favor. And isn't it true that the use of key escrow will make our technology so unattractive to the international marketplace that the United States will lose its edge in the lucrative telecommunications and computer fields? Clipper might clip the entire economy. Nonetheless, on Feb. 4 the White House announced its approval of the Clipper chip, which had been under study as a Government standard since last April, and the Crypto War broke out in full force. Within a month, one civil liberties group, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, received 47,000 electronic missives urging a stop to Clipper. "The war is upon us," wrote Tim May, co-founder of the Cypherpunks, in an urgent electronic dispatch soon after the announcement. "Clinton and Gore folks have shown themselves to be enthusiastic supporters of Big Brother." And though the Clinton Administration's endorsement of Clipper as a Government standard required no Congressional approval, rumblings of discontent came from both sides of the Capitol. Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat whose subcomittee has held contentious hearings on the matter, has called the plan a "misstep," charging that "the Government should not be in the business of mandating particular technologies." Two weeks ago, an AT&T Bell Laboratories researcher revealed that he had found a serious flaw in the Clipper technology itself, enabling techno-savvy lawbreakers to bypass the security fuction of the chip in some applications. Besides being a bad idea, Clipper's foes now say, it doesn't even work properly. Yet the defenders of Clipper have refused to back down, claiming that the scheme -- which is, they often note, voluntary -- is an essential means of stemming an increasing threat to public safety and security by strong encryption in everyday use. Even if Clipper itself has to go back to the drawing board, its Government designers will come up with something 3 of 19 11/29/20, 6:16 PM Battle of the Clipper Chip - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/12/magazine/battle-of-the-clipp... quite similar. The underlying issue remains unchanged: If something like Clipper is not implemented, writes Dorothy E. Denning, a Georgetown University computer scientist, "All communications on the information highway would be immune from lawful interception. In a world threatened by international organized crime, terrorism and rogue governments, this would be folly." The claims from both sides sound wild, almost apocalyptic. The passion blurs the problem: Can we protect our privacy in an age of computers -- without also protecting the dark forces in society? The crypto war is the inevitable consequence of a remarkable discovery made almost 20 years ago, a breakthrough that combined with the microelectronics revolution to thrust the once-obscure field of cryptography into the mainstream of communications policy. It began with Whitfield Diffie, a young computer scientist and cryptographer. He did not work for the Government, which was strange because in the 1960's almost all serious crypto in this country was done under Federal auspices, specifically at the Fort Meade, Md., headquarters of the supersecret National Security Agency. Though it became bigger than the C.I.A., the N.S.A. was for years unknown to Americans; the Washington Beltway joke was that the initials stood for "No Such Agency." Its working premise has always been that no information about its activities should ever be revealed. Its main mission involved cryptography, and the security agency so dominated the field that it had the power to rein in even those few experts in the field who were not on its payroll. But Whitfield Diffie never got that message. He had been bitten by the cryptography bug at age 10 when his father, a professor, brought home the entire crypto shelf of the City College library in New York. Then he lost interest, until he arrived at M.I.T.'s Artifical Intelligence Laboratory in 1966. Two things rekindled his passion. Now trained as a mathematician, he had an affinity for the particular challenges of sophisticated crypto. Just as important, he says, "I was always concerned about individuals, an individual's privacy as opposed to Goverment secrecy." Diffie, now 50, is still committed to those beliefs. When asked about his politics, he says, "I like to describe myself as an iconoclast." He is a computer security specialist for Sun Microsystems, a celebrated cryptographer and an experienced hand at Congressional testimony.