From infobot-owner@wired.com  Mon Jan 31 17:19:15 1994
Subject: Majordomo file: file '1.2/features/crypto-rebels'

[Note: The main article is Crypto-Rebels, but the following side-bar articles
are included also in this file:

 The NSA Remains Cryptic: The Official Reply
 His Crime: Checking Out A Book - John Gilmore Challenges the NSA
 The Bedside Crypto Reader - Further Readings on Cypherpunk Topics
 The NSA is Not Alone

These files are also available on America Online, etc.  Distribution in 
electronic media appears to be A-OK, but restrictions may apply, so it's best
to contact Wired first, before redistributing any further.]


_Wired 1.2_
Crypto-Rebels
*************

The battle is engaged.
It's the FBIs, NSAs, and Equifaxes of the world versus a swelling 
movement of Cypherpunks, civil libertarians, and millionaire hackers.

At stake: Whether privacy will exist in the 21st century.

Steven Levy reports on the Pretty Good Revolution.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The office atmosphere of Cygnus Support, a fast-growing Silicon Valley 
company that earns its dollars by providing support  to users of free 
software, seems like a time warp to the days when hackers ran free. 
Though Cygnus is located in a mall-like business park within earshot of 
US 101, it features a spacious cathedral ceiling overhanging a cluttered 
warren of workstation cubicles arranged in an irregular spherical 
configuration. A mattress is nestled in the rafters. In a hallway behind 
the reception desk is a kitchen laden with snack food and soft drinks.

Today, a Saturday, only a few show up for work. The action instead is in 
a small conference room overlooking the back of the complex - a 
"physical meeting" of a group whose members most often gather in the 
corridors of cyberspace. Their mutual interest is the arcane field of 
cryptography - the study of secret codes and cyphers. The very fact that 
this group exists, however, is indication that the field is about to 
shift into overdrive. This is crypto with an attitude, best embodied by 
the group's moniker: Cypherpunks.

The one o'clock meeting doesn't really get underway until almost three. 
By that time around fifteen techie-cum-civil libertarians are sitting 
around a table, wandering around the room, or just lying on the floor 
staring at the ceiling while listening to the conversations. Most have 
beards and long hair - Smith Brothers gone digital.

The talk today ranges from reports on a recent cryptography conference 
to an explanation of how entropy degrades information systems. There is 
an ad hoc demonstration of a new product, an AT&T "secure" phone, 
supposedly the first conversation-scrambler that's as simple to use as a 
standard-issue phone. The group watches in amusement as two of their 
number, including one of the country's best cryptographic minds, have 
trouble making the thing work. (This is sort of like watching Eric 
Clapton struggle with a new, easy-to-play guitar.) There is discussion 
of random number generators. Technical stuff, but everything has an 
underlying, if not explicitly articulated, political theme: the vital 
importance of getting this stuff out to the world for the public weal.

The people in this room hope for a world where an individual's 
informational footprints - everything from an opinion on abortion to the 
medical record of an actual abortion - can be traced only if the 
individual involved chooses to reveal them; a world where coherent 
messages shoot around the globe by network and microwave, but intruders 
and feds trying to pluck them out of the vapor find only gibberish; a 
world where the tools of prying are transformed into the instruments of 
privacy.

There is only one way this vision will materialize, and that is by 
widespread use of cryptography. Is this technologically possible? 
Definitely. The obstacles are political - some of the most powerful 
forces in government are devoted to the control of these tools. In 
short, there is a war going on between those who would liberate crypto 
and those who would suppress it. The seemingly innocuous bunch strewn 
around this conference room represents the vanguard of the pro-crypto 
forces. Though the battleground seems remote, the stakes are not: The 
outcome of this struggle may determine the amount of freedom our society 
will grant us in the 21st century. To the Cypherpunks, freedom is an 
issue worth some risk. "Arise," urges one of their numbers, "You have 
nothing to lose but your barbed-wire fences."


Crashing the Crypto Monopoly
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
As the Cold War drifts into deep memory, one might think that the 
American body charged with keeping our secret codes and breaking the 
codes of our enemies - the National Security Agency (NSA) - might 
finally breathe easy for the first time in its 30-year existence. 
Instead, it is sweating out its worst nightmare.

The NSA's cryptographic monopoly has evaporated. Two decades ago, no one 
outside the government, or at least outside the government's control, 
performed any serious work in cryptography. That ended abruptly in 1975 
when a 31-year-old computer wizard named Whitfield Diffie came up with a 
new system, called "public-key" cryptography, that hit the world of 
cyphers with the force of an unshielded nuke. The shock wave was 
undoubtedly felt most vividly in the fortress-like NSA headquarters at 
Fort Meade, Maryland.

As a child, Diffie devoured all the books he could find on the subject 
of cryptography. Certainly there is something about codes - secret 
rings, intrigue, Hardy Boys mysteries - that appeals to youngsters. 
Diffie, son of an historian, took them very seriously. Though his 
interest went dormant after he exhausted all the offerings of the local 
city college library, it resurfaced in the mid-1960s, when he became 
part of the computer hacker community at the Massachusetts Institute of 
Technology.

Even as a young man, Diffie's passion for technical, math-oriented 
problems was matched by a keen interest in the privacy of individuals. 
So it was natural that as one of the tenders of a complicated multi-user 
computer system at MIT, he became troubled with the problem of how to 
make the system, which held a person's work and sometimes his or her 
intimate secrets, truly secure. The traditional, top-down approach to 
the problem - protecting the files by user passwords, which in turn were 
stored in the electronic equivalent of vaults tended by trusted system 
administrators - was not satisfying. The weakness of the system was 
clear: The user's privacy depended on the degree to which the 
administrators were willing to protect it. "You may have protected 
files, but if a subpoena was served to the system manager, it wouldn't 
do you any good," Diffie notes with withering accuracy. "The 
administrators would sell you out, because they'd have no interest in 
going to jail."

Diffie recognized that the solution rested in a decentralized system in 
which each person held the literal key to his or her own privacy. He 
tried to get people interested in taking on the mathematical challenge 
of discovering such a system, but there were no takers. It was not until 
the 1970s, when the people running the ARPAnet (destined to become the 
Internet) were exploring security options for their members, that Diffie 
decided to take it on himself. By then he was at Stanford, under the 
thrall of David Kahn's 1967 work, The Codebreakers. It was a revelatory, 
well-written, and meticulously documented history of cryptography, 
focusing on 20th century American military activities, including those 
at the NSA.

"It brought people out of the woodwork and I certainly was one of them," 
recalls Diffie. "I probably read it more carefully than anyone had ever 
read it. By the end of 1973, I was thinking about nothing else." He 
embarked on what was planned to be a worldwide journey in search of 
information on the subject. Gaining access to it was a difficult task, 
since almost everything about modern cryptography was classified, 
available only to NSA-types and academics. Diffie's sojourn took him as 
far as the East Coast, where he met the woman he would eventually marry. 
With his future bride, he moved back to Stanford. It was then that he 
created a revolution in cryptography.

Specifically, the problem with the existing system of cryptography was 
that secure information traveled over insecure channels. In other words, 
a message could be intercepted before reaching its recipient. The 
traditional methods for securing information involved encoding an 
original message - known as a "plaintext," by use of a "key." The key 
would change all the letters of the message so anyone who tried to read 
it would see only an impenetrable "cyphertext." When the cyphertext 
message arrived at its destination, the recipient would use the same key 
to decipher the code, rendering it once again to plaintext. The 
difficulty with this scheme was getting the key from one party to 
another - if you sent it over an insecure channel, what's to stop 
someone from intercepting it and using it to decode all subsequent 
messages?

The problem got even thornier when one tried to imagine encryption 
employed on a massive scale. The only way to do it, really, was to have 
registries, or digital repositories, where keys would be stored. As far 
as Diffie was concerned, that system was screwed - you wound up having 
to trust the people in charge of the registry. It negated the very 
essence of cryptography: to maintain total privacy over your own 
communications.

Diffie also foresaw the day when people would be not only communicating 
electronically, but conducting business that way as well. They would 
need the digital equivalent of contracts and notarized statements. But 
how could this "digital signature," etched not in paper but in easily 
duplicated blocks of ones and zeros, possibly work?

In May 1975, collaborating with Stanford computer scientist Martin 
Hellman, Diffie cracked both problems. His scheme was called public-key 
cryptography. It was a brilliant breakthrough: Every user in the system 
has two keys - a public key and a private key. The public key can be 
widely distributed without compromising security; the private key, 
however, is held more closely than an ATM password - you don't let 
nobody get at it. For relatively arcane mathematical reasons, a message 
encoded with either key can be decoded with the other. For instance, if 
I want to send you a secure letter, I encrypt it with your public key 
(which I have with your blessing), and send you the cyphertext. You 
decipher it using your private key. Likewise, if you send a message to 
me, you can encrypt it with my public key, and I'll switch it back to 
plaintext with my private key.

This principle can also be used for authentication. Only one person can 
encrypt text with my private key - me. If you can decode a message with 
my public key, you know beyond a doubt that it's straight from my 
machine to yours. The message, in essence, bears my digital signature.

Public-key cryptography, in the words of David Kahn, was not only "the 
most revolutionary new concept in the field since. . .the Renaissance," 
but it was generated totally outside of the government's domain - by a 
privacy fanatic, no less  By the time Diffie and Hellman started 
distributing pre-prints of their scheme in late 1975, an independent 
movement in cryptography, centered in academia, was growing. These new 
cryptographers had read Kahn's book, but more important, they realized 
that the accelerating use of computers was going to mean a growth surge 
in the field. This expanding community soon had regular conferences and 
eventually published its own scientific journal.

By 1977, three members of this new community created a set of algorithms 
that implemented the Diffie-Hellman scheme. Called RSA for its founders 
- MIT scientists Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman - it offered encryption 
that was likely to be stronger than the Data Encryption Standard (DES), 
a government-approved alternative that does not use public keys. The 
actual strength of key-based cryptographic systems rests largely in the 
size of the key - in other words, how many bits of information make up 
the key. The larger the key, the harder it is to break the code. While 
DES, which was devised at IBM's research lab, limits key size to 56 
bits, RSA keys could be any size. (The trade-off was that bigger keys 
are unwieldy, and RSA runs much more slowly than DES.) But DES had an 
added burden: Rumors abounded that the NSA had forced IBM to 
intentionally weaken the system so that the government could break DES-
en-coded messages. RSA did not have that stigma. (The NSA has denied 
these rumors.)

All that aside, the essential fact about RSA is that it was a working 
public-key system, and thus did not suffer from the dire flaw of all 
previous systems: the need to safely exchange private keys. It was 
flexible enough to be used to address the massive requirements of the 
crypto future. The algorithms were eventu-ally patented and licensed to 
RSA Data Security, whose corporate mission was to create privacy and 
authentication tools.

As holder of the public-key patents, RSA Data Security is ideally placed 
to sell its privacy and authentication wares to businesses. Customers 
who plan to integrate RSA software in their systems include Apple, 
Microsoft, WordPerfect, Novell, and AT&T. RSA's president, Jim Bidzos, a 
non-cryptographer, is a compelling spokesperson for the need for 
privacy. He has cast himself as an adversary of the NSA, fighting legal 
restrictions on the export of his product. He even has been known to 
broadly hint that the NSA has used back-channels to retard the flow of 
his products.

Yet a number of privacy activists regard Bidzos and his company with 
caution. Some, like Jim Warren, the PC pioneer who chaired the first 
Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference in 1991, are unhappy that a 
single company holds the domestic rights to such a broad concept as 
public-key cryptography. Others are even more concerned that RSA, a 
respectable business, will be unable to successfully resist any 
government pressure to limit the strength of the cryptography it sells.

In the Cypherpunk mind, cryptography is too important to leave to 
governments or even well-meaning companies. In order to insure that the 
tools of privacy are available to all, individual acts of heroism are 
required. Which brings us to Phil Zimmermann.


The Pretty Good Revolution
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Phil Zimmermann is no stranger to political action. His participation in 
anti-nuke sit-ins has twice led to jailings. He has been a military 
policy analyst to political candidates. But his vocation is computers, 
and he has always been fascinated with cryptography. When he first heard 
about public-key crypto he was handling two jobs, one as a programmer 
and another unpaid post "saving the world." He was about to find a way 
to combine the two. Why not implement a public-key system on personal 
computers, using RSA algorithms?

Zimmermann posed this question around 1977, but didn't begin serious 
work to answer it until 1984. The more he thought about the issues, 
though, the more important the project became. As he later wrote in the 
product documentation:

"You may be planning a political campaign, discussing your taxes, or 
having an illicit affair. Or you may be doing something that you feel 
shouldn't be illegal, but is. Whatever it is, you don't want your 
private electronic mail or confidential documents read by anyone else. 
There's nothing wrong with asserting your privacy. Privacy is as apple-
pie as the Constitution.

What if everyone believed that law-abiding citizens should use postcards 
for their mail? If some brave soul tried to assert his privacy by using 
an envelope for his mail, it would draw suspicion. Perhaps the 
authorities would open his mail to see what he's hiding. Fortunately, we 
don't live in that kind of world, because everyone protects most of 
their mail with envelopes. So no one draws suspicion by asserting their 
privacy with an envelope. There's safety in numbers. Analogously, it 
would be nice if everyone routinely used encryption for all their e-
mail, innocent or not, so that no one drew suspicion by asserting their 
e-mail privacy with encryption. Think of it as a form of solidarity.

If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy. Intelligence 
agencies have access to good cryptographic technology. So do the big 
arms and drug traffickers. . . But ordinary people and grass-roots 
political organizations mostly have not had access to affordable 
military grade public-key cryptographic technology. Until now."


Not being a professional cryptographer, Zimmermann moved slowly. By 
1986, he had implemented RSA, and a year later wrote a scrambling 
function he called Bass-O-Matic, in homage to a Saturday Night Live 
commercial for a blender that liquifies fish. Piece by piece he built 
his program. In June, 1991, it was ready for release. He named his 
software PGP, for Pretty Good Privacy. Though at one time he mused about 
asking users for a fee, he subsequently became concerned that the 
government would one day outlaw the use of cryptography. Since 
Zimmermann wanted the tools for privacy disseminated widely before that 
day came, he decided to give PGP away. No strings.

This required some personal sacrifice. Zimmermann missed five mortgage 
payments producing PGP. "I came within an inch of losing my house," he 
says.

But the effort was worth it. PGP was unprecedented. It was, Zimmermann 
claims, faster than anything else available. And despite troublesome 
details like patent law and export code, it was very available.
Zimmermann put his first version, which ran only on PCs, on computer 
bulletin-board systems and gave it to a friend who posted it on the 
Internet. "Like thousands of dandelion seeds blowing in the wind," he 
wrote, PGP spread throughout cyberspace. Within hours, people were 
downloading it all over the country and beyond. "It was overseas the day 
after the release," he said. "I've gotten mail from just about every 
country on Earth."

PGP won no popularity contests at RSA Data Security. Jim Bidzos was 
incensed that Zimmermann, whom he considers not an altruistic activist 
but an opportunist who still hopes to make a buck off stealing 
intellectual property, had blithely included RSA's patented algorithms 
in PGP. Zimmermann's defense was that he wasn't selling PGP, but 
distributing it  as a sort of research project. (Some people think that 
PGP, by spreading the gospel of public key cryptography, is the best 
thing that ever happened to RSA.)

In any case, the legal situation is still hazy, with Zimmermann now 
refraining from distributing the software (though he updates the user's 
guide and provides guidance and encouragement to those who have chosen 
to revise the software).

What does the NSA think about Phil Zimmermann's Johnny Appleseed-like 
attempt to bring the world crypto tools? Zimmermann has heard no formal 
complaint, even though many believe that PGP's strength in protecting 
data is such that it would never be approved for export to foreign 
shores. Zimmermann, of course, did not submit PGP to such scrutiny 
because he required no export licence for international sales - after 
all, he was not selling it. In any case, Zimmermann himself never 
shipped the software overseas, warning users that it was their business 
if they chose to.

To be extra careful, Zimmermann arranged for the more powerful version 
2.0, released last September, to be distributed from New Zealand "into" 
the United States, so there would be no question about exporting 
forbidden tools. (Due to some regulatory oddities, RSA is patented 
"only" in the United States, and thus PGP is a potential patent 
infringer only within US borders.)

An uncounted number of US users, probably thousands, have PGP in its 
various incarations - on DOS, Macintosh, Amiga, Atari ST, or VAX/VMS 
computers.

At first the silence from the NSA actually worried Zimmermann. He 
wondered if it meant that PGP had some sort of weakness, a "trap door" 
that the government had identified. But after a session with a world-
class cryptographer, Zimmermann was assured that while PGP had many 
inefficiencies, it offered protection at least as strong as the 
government-standard DES. It truly was "pretty good" protection. So 
people could evaluate it on their own, Zimmermann allowed free 
distribition of the source code - something one does not enjoy with 
alternative encryption products. And most of the inefficiencies are 
addressed in version 2.0.

(It was only as this article was being prepared, in February 1993, that 
Zimmermann was questioned about PGP by two US Customs officials who flew 
from California to ask about how the program might have found its way 
out of the country. As of press time, it seems that this investigation 
might be still active.

Jim Bidzos of RSA, obviously not a disinterested source, claims that not 
only Zimmermann, but anyone using PGP, is at risk. He scoffs at 
Zimmermann's efforts to stay within the letter of the law, charging that 
the use of PGP is "an illegal activity that violates patent and export 
law." Bidzos has written to institutions like Stanford and MIT, 
informing them that any copies of PGP on their computers would put them 
on the wrong side of the law, and he says that the universities have 
subsequently banned PGP.)

Still, PGP has changed the world of crypto. It is not a solution to the 
problem by any means - using it adds a degree of difficulty to e-mail 
and file transfers - but it has developed a cult among those motivated 
to use it. It's sort of a badge of honor to include one's PGP public key 
with e-mail messages.

And until the long-awaited alternative for electronic crypto on the 
Internet, Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM), is released - after five years of 
planning, the release seems near - PGP is one of the only games in town. 
(Other alternatives include an RSA-approved product called RIPEM.) Even 
then, many users may stick to PGP. "PEM is technically cleaner but is 
bogged down in bureacracy - for instance, before you use PEM you must 
first register a key with something called a policy certification 
authority," says crypto-activist and Cypherpunk John Gilmore. "PGP is 
portable, requires no bureaucracy, and has more than a year's head-
start."

Ultimately, the value of PGP is in its power to unleash the 
possibilities of cryptography. Tom Jennings, founder of the FIDOnet 
matrix of computer bulletin boards, finds the software useful, but 
becomes positively rapturous as he contemplates its psychic influence. 
To Jennings, a gay activist, cryptography has the potential to be a 
powerful force in protecting the privacy of targeted individuals.
"People who never have had cops stomping through their house don't care 
about this," Jennings said. He believes that public awareness of these 
issues will be raised only by making the tools available. "If you can't 
demonstrate stuff, it's hard to explain." On the other hand, said 
Jennings, "If we flood the world with these tools, that's going to make 
a big difference."


The Empire Strikes Back
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The flood to which Jennings refers is now only a trickle. But you don't 
have to be a cryptographer to know which way the code will flow. The 
flood indeed is coming, and the agency charged with safeguarding and 
mastering encryption technologies is about to be thrust into a cypher 
age in which messages that once were clear will require tedious cracking 
- and may not be crackable at all. While it is impossible to read the 
government's mind concerning the prospects of this scenario (see The NSA 
Remains Cryptic, page 57), its actions are telling. The strategy is one 
of resistance. The feds are stepping up the war between crypto activists 
and crypto suppressors.

The conflict actually began in the late 1970s. As wars go, this one was 
more cloak than dagger, with no disappearances in the night - unlikely 
to inspire a movie starring Steven Seagall, or even Robert Redford. As 
Diffie explains, "the whole thing has been conducted in a gentlemanly 
fashion." Yet the stakes are high: in one view, our privacy; in the 
other view, our national security. The government was not above 
implicitly threatening independent cryptographers with jail.

According to The Puzzle Palace, James Bamford's classic NSA expose, the 
first salvo in the conflict was a letter written in July 1977 by an NSA 
employee named Joseph A. Meyer. It warned those planning to attend an 
upcoming symposium on cryptography that participation might be unlawful 
under an Arms Regulation law, which controls weapons found on the US 
Munitions List (cryptographic tools, it turns out, are classified right 
alongside tanks and bomber planes). Though the ensuing controversy in 
this case blew over, it became clear that NSA regarded what came from 
the minds of folks like Whit Diffie to be contraband. In an 
unprecedented interview, the then-new NSA Director Bobby Inman floated 
the idea that his agency might have the same control over crypto as the 
Department of Energy has over nukes. In 1979, Inman gave an address that 
came to be known as "the sky is falling" speech, warning that "non-
governmental cryptologic activity and publication. . .poses clear risks 
to the national security."

Through the 1980s, both sides became entrenched in their views - but it 
was by far the alternative crypto movement that gathered strength. Not 
only was the community growing to the point where government crypto 
specialists came to terms with the phenomenon, but computers - the 
devices destined to be crypto engines - became commonplace. Just as it 
was obvious that all communication and data storage was going digital, 
it was a total no-brainer that effective cryptography was essential to 
the maintenance of even a semblance of the privacy and security people 
and corporations enjoyed in the pre-digital era.

In fact, our personal information - medical information, credit ratings, 
income - lies unencrypted on databases. Our most intimate secrets rest 
on our hard disks, sitting ducks. Our phone conversations bounce off 
satellites, easily pluckable by those sophisticated enough to sort these 
things out. Our cellular phone conversations are routinely overheard by 
any goofus with a broadband radio - just ask Prince Charles.

And if things are tough for individuals, corporations are in worse shape 
- even their (weakly) encrypted secret plans are being swiped by 
competitors. Recently, the head of the French intelligence service quite 
cheerfully admitted intercepting confidential IBM documents and handing 
them over to French-government-backed competitors. (In cases like these, 
weak encryption - which gives a false sense of security - is worse than 
no encryption at all.)

In the face of this apparent inevitability - crypto for the masses  - 
what's a secret government agency to do? Throw in the towel, let the 
market determine the strength of the people's algorithms, and grumpily 
adjust to the new realities? No way. The government has chosen this 
moment to dig in and take its last stand. The future of crypto, and our 
ability to protect our information to the fullest extent, hangs in the 
balance.

The specter of what one Cypherpunk calls "Crypto Anarchy" - where 
strong, easy-to-use encryption is accessible to all - terrifies those 
accustomed to the old reality. Per-haps the best expression of these 
fears comes from Donn Parker, a think-tank computer security specialist 
who is in synch with the government mindset. "We have the capability of 
100-percent privacy," he says. "But if we use this I don't think society 
can survive."

 A somewhat less apocalyptic yet equally stern conclusion comes from 
Georgetown University Professor Dorothy Denning, a respected figure in 
academic crypto circles: "If we fail to enact legislation that will 
ensure a continued capability for court-ordered electronic 
surveillance," Denning writes, ". . .systems fielded without an adequate 
provision for court-ordered intercepts would become sanctuaries for 
criminality wherein Organized Crime leaders, drug dealers, terrorists, 
and other criminals could conspire and act with impunity. Eventually, we 
could find ourselves with an increase in major crimes against society, a 
greatly diminished capacity to fight them, and no timely solution."

Denning has spoken favorably of a plan that sends chills up Cypherpunk 
spines: It allows people access to public-key cryptography only if they 
agree to "escrow" their private keys in a repository controlled by a 
third party who would, under a judge's order or other dire circumstance, 
give it to some government or police body.

Key registries, of course, would require crypto users to trust self-
interested third parties, the very paradox that led Diffie to develop 
public-key cryptography. Diffie did not intend private keys to be shared 
- not with colleagues, not with spouses, and certainly not with some 
swiftie in a suit who would flip it over to the cops at the first flash 
of a warrant. As Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry 
Barlow put it, "You can have my encryption algorithm. . . when you pry 
my cold dead fingers from my private key."

But Dorothy Denning has a point. Unfettered cryptography does have its 
trade-offs. The same codes that protect journalists and accountants will 
abet the security of mobsters, child molesters, and terrorists. And if 
everyone encrypts, there certainly would be a weakening of our 
intelligence agencies, and possibly our national security.

As far as the NSA is concerned, its very mission is to establish and 
maintain superiority in making and breaking codes. If strong 
cryptography enters common usage, this task will be greatly complicated, 
if not rendered nearly impossible.

The government itself has taken action on three fronts:

- The first is a continuation of the secrecy with which it guards all 
information concerning cryptography. Traditionally, the NSA argument for 
this has been unimpeachable: Anything, even a seemingly innocuous fact 
about what we are doing, or even what we know, gives a potential 
adversary an advantage that it would not otherwise enjoy. Thus for 
years, even the very existence of the NSA (nicknamed No Such Agency by 
some) was denied. However, as cryptography becomes more essential for 
the protection of both individuals and corporations, the "anything-we-
disclose-helps-our-enemies" argument is under attack. One of the most 
diligent prodders of the National Security Agency in this regard is John 
Gilmore (see His Crime: Checking Out a Book, page 58).

- The second front is the ingenious use of export controls to limit the 
strength of cryptography within this country. Despite the desires of the 
NSA, US law currently protects the way people communicate within the 
boundaries of the country. Practically speaking however, only the most 
motivated communicators take the trouble to employ the cumbersome 
measures necessary to encrypt their own data. Routine encryption can be 
made easy - so painless that it happens automatically. But for that to 
happen, the mass producers of software would have to include it as a 
default standard in their products. Here's where the export catch kicks 
in - companies like Microsoft, Apple, and WordPerfect find it 
unprofitable to produce two versions of their wares, one for domestic 
use and one for sales abroad. The path of least resistance is to adhere 
to the weak-encryption export standards ostensibly designed to deny 
strong encryption to our enemies. As a result, domestic users have less 
security than they would have otherwise.

- The third front is a legislative initiative known as Digital 
Telephony, in which the FBI has taken center stage as the lead actor in 
limiting not only crypto, but any system that would pose a problem for 
government agents implementing legal wiretaps. The deal proposed to the 
public is tempting - if we don't limit our high-tech communications so 
that government agents can easily plug in (and by association this means 
limiting crypto), drug smugglers, terrorists, and white-collar criminals 
will run rampant.

ACLU lawyer Janlori Goldman contends, however, that by effectively 
"dumbing down" our entire communications structure, the law will put a 
halt to our economy's most competitive industries. While defending 
Digital Telephony on ABC's Nightline, FBI chief William Sessions claimed 
that the law would merely allow law enforcement to keep pace with 
technology. But as Whit Diffie notes, "The most important impact of 
technology on communications security is that it draws better and better 
traffic into vulnerable channels." In other words, Digital Telephony, if 
passed, would grant law-enforcement access not only to phone 
conversations, but a whole range of personal information previously 
stored in hard copy but ripe for plucking in the digital age. And if law 
enforcement can get at it, so can others - either government agents 
over-stepping their legal authority, or crooks.

In one sense this debate is moot, because the crypto genie is out of the 
bottle. The government may limit exports, but strong encryption software 
packages literally are being sold on the streets of Moscow. The NSA may 
keep its papers classified, but a whole generation of independent 
cryptographers is breaking ground and publishing freely. And then there 
are the crypto-guerrillas, who have already penetrated deep into the 
territory of their adversaries.


The Promise of Crypto Anonymity
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The first physical Cypherpunk meeting occurred early last autumn at the 
instigation of two software engineers who had developed an interest in 
crypto. One was Tim May, a former Intel physicist who "retired" several 
years ago, at age 34, with stock options sufficient to assure that he 
would never flip a burger for Wendy's. May, who reluctantly permits 
journalists to pigeon-hole him as a libertarian, is the in-house 
theoretician, and author of the widely circulated "Crypto Anarchist 
Manifesto." The other founder, Eric Hughes, has become the moderator of 
the physical meetings, maintaining an agenda that mixes technical issues 
of Cypherpunk works-in-progress to reports from the political front.

It would be wrong to think of Cypherpunks as a formal group. It's more a 
gathering of those who share a predilection for codes, a passion for 
privacy, and the gumption to do something about it. Anyone who decides 
to spread personal crypto or its gospel is a traveler in the territory 
of Cypherpunk.

The real action in that realm occurs via The List, an electronic posting 
ground which commonly generates more than 50 messages a day. People on 
The List receive the messages on their Internet mailboxes and can 
respond. The List is sort of a perpe-tual conversation pit from which 
gossip is exchanged, schemes are hatched, fantasies are outlined, and 
code is swapped. The modus operandi of Cypherpunks is a familiar one to 
hackers - If You Build It, They Will Come.

As Eric Hughes posted on The List: Cypherpunks write code. They know 
that someone has to write code to defend privacy, and since it's their 
privacy they're going to write it. . .Cypherpunks don't care if you 
don't like the software they write. Cypherpunks know that software can't 
be destroyed. Cypherpunks know that a widely dispersed system can't be 
shut down. Cypherpunks will make the networks safe for privacy.

As the Cypherpunks see it, the magic of public-key crypto can be 
extended far beyond the exchange of messages with secrecy. Ultimately, 
its value will be to provide anonymity, the right most threatened by a 
fully digitized society. Our transactions and conversations are now more 
easily traced by the digital trails we leave behind. By following the 
electronic links we make, one can piece together a depressingly detailed 
profile of who we are: Our health records, phone bills, credit 
histories, arrest records, and electronic mail all connect our actions 
and expressions to our physical selves. Crypto presents the possibility 
of severing these links. It is possible to use cryptography to actually 
limit the degree to which one can track the trail of a transaction.

This is why certain Cypherpunks are hard at work creating remailers that 
allow messages to be sent without any possible means of tracing who sent 
the message. Ideally, if someone chooses a pseudonym in one of these 
systems, no one else can send mail under that name. This allows for the 
possibility of a true digital persona - an "identity" permanently 
disembodied from one's physical being.

Cryptographic techniques can also potentially assure anonymity in more 
prosaic exchanges. For instance, in a system designed to protect 
privacy, a prospective employer requesting proof of a college degree 
will have access to records with that information - but will only be 
able to verify that sole datum. Cypherpunks even discuss certain cases 
in which a person's name would be one of the pieces protected - for 
instance, a police officer checking one's license need not know a 
driver's name, but only whether he or she is licensed to drive. The 
ultimate Crypto Anarchy tool would be anonymous digital money, an idea 
proposed and being implemented  by cryptographer David Chaum. (Chaum 
also first proposed the idea of remailers - a good example of how the 
Cypherpunks are using academic research from the crypto community to 
build new privacy tools.)

In essence, the Cypherpunks propose an alternative to the continuation 
of the status quo, where cryptography is closely held and privacy is an 
increasingly rare commodity. Ultimately, the lessons taught by the 
Cypherpunks, as well as the tools they produce, are designed to help 
shape a world where cryptography runs free - a Pac-Man-like societal 
maneuver in which the digital technology that previously snatched our 
privacy is used, via cryptography, to snatch it back.

Tim May admits that if the whole cryptography matter were put to a vote 
among his fellow Americans, his side would lose. "Americans have two 
dichotomous views held exactly at the same time," he claims. "One view 
is, None of your damn business, a man's home is his castle. What I do is 
my business.' And the other is, What have you got to hide? If you didn't 
have anything to hide, you wouldn't be using cryptography.' There's a 
deep suspicion of people who want to keep things secret."

There's also a legitimate fear that with the anonymous systems proposed 
by crypto activists, illegal activities could be conducted more easily, 
and crucial messages our government now easily intercepts might never be 
noticed. But, as May says, these fears are ultimately irrelevant. Crypto 
Anarchy, he believes, is inevitable, despite the forces marshaled 
against it. "I don't see any chance that it will be done politically," 
says the Cypherpunk. "[But] it will be done technologically. It's 
already happening."


_________________________________________________________________
Steven Levy (steven@well.sf.ca.us) writes the Iconoclast column for 
Macworld and is author of Hackers, Artificial Life, and The Unicorn 
Secret, all unencrypted.


******************************************************************

The NSA Remains Cryptic: The Official Reply
*******************************************
At one time, the National Security Agency would not even admit that it 
existed. Now, it has a Public Affairs Staff whose usual modus operandi 
is to reply to faxed questions from journalists. Attempting to get the 
NSA view of the alternative crypto movement, we asked the NSA the 
following six questions:

(1) In the past two decades, a considerable community of serious 
cryptographers, in both academia and commerce, has emerged. What is the 
NSA's role in this evolutionary broadening of the field?

(2) In light of the increasing need for privacy of communications, does 
the NSA anticipate less stringent secrecy concerning cryptography 
materials it controls?

(3) What is the NSA's position on the desirability of strong 
cryptographic methods in individual domestic communications (e-mail, 
voice-mail, etc.)? Would it impede your work?

(4) Does the NSA believe that the use of encryption by US citizens and 
others communicating across borders impedes its mission?

(5) Does the NSA endorse the idea of a mandatory private-key

registry, accessible to the government in cases when a judge orders it 
suitable, for those using public-key cryptography?

(6) Many people I speak to assume that all international communications 
are in some way monitored by the NSA. Some people have even speculated 
that the NSA routinely captures and in some way scans the entire traffic 
volume of the Internet (mail and/or news groups). Are these claims 
apocryphal?

Here, in its entirety, is the NSA reply:

The emergence of cryptography in the public sector has stemmed from the 
rapid growth in communications and information systems for private and 
commercial applications, and efforts to ensure that these systems are 
safe from hackers, viruses, and unauthorized access. One of NSA's 
primary responsibilities in this arena is to provide the means of 
protecting vital US government and military communications and 
information systems of a classified nature. NSA maintains a high degree 
of expertise in cryptographic technology and keeps abreast of 
advancements, domestically and abroad, in order to better protect vital 
government communications.

Regarding questions two and three, as we have just stated, NSA is 
responsible for protecting US government classified information systems. 
We do not anticipate relaxing security and integrity of these government 
systems since such disclosure could reduce the effectiveness of these 
measures. As for domestic use of cryptography, we have always supported 
the use of cryptographic products by US businesses operating 
domestically and overseas to protect their sensitive and proprietary 
information.

Finally, as a policy matter, NSA does not discuss details of its signals 
intelligence operations, including the types of communications it 
monitors. Please note, however, that our signals intelligence operations 
are exclusively limited to producing foreign intelligence information 
considered vital to the security interest of the US. We, therefore, 
offer no comment to questions four and six.

In regard to question five and the idea of mandatory key registration, 
we defer to the Department of Justice/FBI.

************************************************************************

His Crime: Checking Out A Book
John Gilmore Challenges the NSA
*******************************

One day last November, the Justice Department called John Gilmore's 
lawyer. The message they left: Gilmore was on the verge of violating the 
Espionage Act. A conviction could send him to jail for ten years. His 
crime? Basically, showing people a library book.

It was a fight that Gilmore instigated. As Sun Microsystems employee 
number five, Gilmore retired with a bankroll in the millions. Later, he 
had the opportunity not only to co-found a new company - called Cygnus 
Support - but to commit acts of public service. "As I get older," says 
the 37-year-old computer programmer, "I realize how limited our time on 
Earth is." His cause of choice was the liberation of cryptography, a 
field that had fascinated him since he was a boy.

"We aren't going to be secure in our persons, houses, papers, and 
effects unless we get a better understanding of cryptography," he says. 
"Our government is building some of those tools for its own use - there 
have been breakthroughs - but they're unavailable to us. We paid for 
them."

To remedy this situation, Gilmore and his lawyer, Lee Tien, have tried 
to rescue documents from the shroud of secrecy. Gilmore's first major 
coup was the distribution of a paper written by a Xerox cryptographer 
that the NSA had convinced Xerox not to publish. Gilmore posted the 
document on the Net, and within hours, thousands of people had a copy.

Gilmore's next action was to challenge the NSA's refusal to follow 
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) protocols in releasing requested 
documents. The documents he sought were 30-year-old manuals written by 
William F. Friedman, the father of American cryptography. These seminal 
textbooks had been declassified, but later, for undisclosed reasons, 
reclassified. The NSA did not respond to Gilmore's request for their 
release within the required time-frame, so he took them to court. 
Meanwhile, a friend of Gilmore discovered copies of two of the 
documents: one in the Virginia Military Institute Library, the other on 
microfilm at Boston University. The friend gave copies to Gilmore, who 
then notified the judge hearing the FOIA appeal that the secret 
documents were actually on library shelves.

It was then that the government notified Gilmore that distribution of 
the Friedman texts would violate the Espionage Act, which dictated a 
possible ten-year prison sentence for violators. Gilmore sent a sealed 
copy to the judge, asking whether his First Amendment rights were being 
violated by the notice; he also alerted the press. Meanwhile, worried 
about whether the government might stage a surprise search of his house 
or business, he hid copies of the documents - one in an abandoned 
building. On November 25, 1992, an article about the case appeared in 
the San Francisco Examiner. Two days later, a NSA spokesperson announced 
that the agency had once again declassified the texts. (A Laguna Hills, 
California publisher, the Aegean Park Press, quickly printed and 
released the books, Military Crypt-analysis, Part III, and Part IV.)

Gilmore is still pressing his case, requesting a classified book called 
Military Cryptanalytics, Volume III. More important, he hopes to get a 
general court ruling that will force the NSA to adhere to FOIA rules, 
and possibly even a ruling that part of the Espionage Act, by using 
prior restraint to suppress free speech, is unconstitutional.

What if Gilmore wins, and the NSA is forced to reveal all but the most 
secret information about cryptography? Would national security be 
compromised, as the NSA claims? "I don't think so," says Gilmore. "We 
are not asking to threaten the national security. We're asking to 
discard a Cold War bureaucratic idea of national security which is 
obsolete. My response to the NSA is: Show us. Show the public how your 
ability to violate the privacy of any citizen has prevented a major 
disaster. They're abridging the freedom and privacy of all citizens - to 
defend us against a bogeyman that they will not explain. The decision to 
literally trade away our privacy is one that must be made by the whole 
society, not made unilaterally by a military spy agency."


Gilmore Speaks to Congress
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
John Gilmore presented the following "sound bits" to Congress for 
consideration as it debates tech-nology policy:

-- Government investment invariably brings government control, which is 
harmful to the development of a communications medium in a free and open 
society.

-- The Government seized control of telegraphy, radio, and television 
early in their development, and they have never had full First Amendment 
protection.

-- Private, interactive, electronic media involve Fourth and Fifth 
Amendment issues as well.

-- The Executive Branch is already advocating broad wiretapping, and 
banning of privacy technologies, and they don't even own the network. If 
the government owned the network, there'd be no stopping them.

-- The risk of moving society into media where individual rights are 
regularly abridged is too great. Economics is pushing us into individual 
electronic communication, regardless.

-- If Congress truly believes in the Bill of Rights, it should get the 
hell out of the networking business and stay out of it.

-- Privacy and authenticity technologies are key to reliable and 
trustworthy social and business interactions over networks.

-- Current government policies actively prohibit and inhibit the 
research, design, manufacturing, sale, and use of these technologies.

-- Taxpayers have been investing many billions of dollars per year in 
these technologies - in the NSA "black budget" - but have seen no return 
on this investment.


**********************************************************************

The Bedside Crypto Reader
Further Readings on Cypherpunk Topics
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

General:
********
_The Codebreakers_
David Kahn (Macmillan, 1967).
The seminal cryptographic history.

_Puzzle Palace_
James Bamford (Penguin, 1983). 
A classic expose of the National Security Agency.


Books on Cryptographic Systems:
*******************************
_Contemporary Cryptology_
Edited by Gustavus J. Simmons (IEEE Press, 1991).
A fairly technical volume offering solid background on the subject, 
including a chapter on the history of public-key cryptography by 
Whitfield Diffie.

_Cryptography and Data Security_
Dorothy Denning (Addison-Wesley, 1982).
A good primer to the workings of crypto systems.


Sci-Fi Novels Beloved by Cypherpunks
************************************
_Ender's Game_
Orson Scott Card (Tor, 1985).
Some vivid scenarios in which crypto anonymity is crucial.

_Shock-Wave Rider_
John Brunner (Ballantine, 1976).
Chilling representation of an oppressive lack of privacy in a networked 
society.

_True Names_
Werner Vinge (Blue Jay Books, 1984).
A novel of cyberspace-style sojourns that outline links between 
electronic identity and physical identity.

**********************************************************************

The NSA is Not Alone
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Cryptographic paranoia is not limited to the United States. Flush with 
enthusiasm over the export prospects for their new digital cellular 
telephone system, European telecom companies a year or so ago changed 
the name of their cellular phone consortium from Group System Mobile to 
Global System Mobile. Unfortunately the new system is not so global 
after all. In January, European governments decided to list the new 
telephones alongside nuclear fuses and other goods whose export is 
restricted in the name of national security.

Like their US counterparts, the European governments' problem with 
Global System Mobile - or GSM as it is more familiarly known - is that 
the phones cannot be tapped. In the name of privacy, each GSM handset 
encrypts its signal using an algorithm called A5. As a sort of 
backhanded testimonial to A5's effectiveness, NATO governments have 
decided that it is far too good to sell to those whose privacy they 
would not wish to respect - like Saddam Hussein's tank corps. So they 
have used their powers under the COCOM agreement on "strategic" trade to 
limit exports.

The companies making GSM equipment - which include most of Europe's big 
telecoms firms - don't want an export product that they cannot export. 
So they are busily devising a new cryptographic technology - called A5X 
- which doesn't work as well. The new A5X will be much easier to crack 
than the old A5 technology. The two will also be compatible; so in 
theory both could be used at the same time - one for export markets and 
one at home. That way GSM could make good on its marketing promise that 
one handset will work anywhere in the world. The intriguing question, 
however, is whether they will both be used.

Britain's two cellular operators, Vodafone and Cellnet, both say they 
have heard hints - nothing direct, just hints - that various police and 
security services (stuck for the moment with A5) would be happier if 
they could eavesdrop on domestic conversations carried on GSM as 
conveniently as do their counterparts abroad (who only have to crack 
A5X). Racal, Vodafone's parent, recently specified A5X for a network 
sold to Australia, which is not a country widely thought of as a threat 
to the free world. If cellular companies do indeed swap to A5X at home 
to facilitate government eavesdropping, the Cypherpunk movement will 
more likely than not go global as well. Keep listening.


- by John Browning



(c) 1993 Wired magazine

