########## ########## ########## | RAPID GROWTH OF ONLINE SERVICES
########## ########## ########## | ONE BBSCON /EFF LIBRARY/ USENET
#### #### #### |
######## ######## ######## | JOHN PERRY BARLOW ON
######## ######## ######## | THE NSA, THE FBI, ENCRYPTION,
#### #### #### | AND WIRE-TAPPING
########## #### #### |
########## #### #### | THE TAO TE CHIP
=====================================================================
EFFector Online JULY 29, 1992 Issue 3.1 / Part 1
A Publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
ISSN 1062-9424
=====================================================================
ONLINE SERVICES EXPERIENCE SOLID GROWTH OVER PAST 5 YEARS
WITH MORE FORECAST FOR THE NEAR FUTURE
A new study released by SIMBA Information, a research group based in
Wilton, Connecticut, says sales by online services increased by 61.1
years, says SIMBA, with a projected increase of 48%.
By 1996, the online information market should be worth about $14.2 billion
annually. Business uses will consume the lion's share of this market by a
factor of 24 to 1. Regardless of this, the services used by consumers were
the fastest growing segment of the market in the 1990-1991 period. This
five years.
The report, "Online Services: 1992 Review, Trends, and Forecast" was
Other items in the report of interest: Subscribers to online services
numbered 5.4 million at the end of 1991, an increase of 18% over 1990.
Leading online services (CompuServe, Genie, Prodigy, etc.) reported an
aggregate sales growth of nearly 7% in 1991 from 1990 levels.
Some of the more notable conclusions of this report are:
#North American-based online services account for 57% of
worldwide sales,with rapid growth in the near term.
#More than half of the growth in online subscribers in 1991
was accounted for by Prodigy.
#One out of every five home computers has a modem.
#As the Regional Bell companies enter the online services
arena, the initial focal point of their efforts will be
online directory publishing.
#Even though the report gives detailed profiles of 35 major
players, it notes that most online services and database
publishers are relatively small operations.
-==--==--==-<>-==--==--==-
EFF to Crash The ONE BBSCON
August 13-16, Stouffer Concourse Hotel, Denver Colorado.
The ONE BBSCON is the major BBS conference of the year, hosting seminars in
RelayNet, INet, et. al.; Graphics over a Modem; Learn from the Winners; as
And EFF will be there with a booth as well. We'll be doing the usual
booth-related activities such as handing out literature and selling
t-shirts; however, we're more interested in talking with the members of the
BBS community and learning what it needs from EFF. Along with seminars on
BBSs and the Law, EFF staff counsel Shari Steele will be presenting a talk
on the EFF at which we will be looking for feedback. If you'll be
attending, do stop by either the booth or the seminar and tell us what you
think.
For more information on ONE BBSCON, contact
ONE, Inc.
4255 S. Buckley Road
Suite 308
Aurora, Colorado 80013
(303)693-5252
Note: There is no email address. Leaves room for improvement.
-==--==--==-<>-==--==--==-
UPDATE ON THE EFF LIBRARY
The EFF Library was set up over a year ago when it became clear that,
of hard copy. At that time, we had a backlog of around 1,000 documents,
books and magazines concerning issues relevant to the Electronic Frontier.
We engaged a professional librarian, Hae Young Wang, to bring order to
chaos, and to provide us with a method that would enable us to file and
Today, the EFF library in Cambridge houses over 2,300 items. The holdings
cover journal articles, newspaper articles, conference proceedings, court
nclude such things as information infrastructure, computers and civil
liberties, intellectual property and copyrights, and EFF archives.
The Library also maintains over 130 subscriptions to magazines and
newsletters.
anonymous ftp archive files. These files, which are accessible to everyone
more user-friendly and informative manner. In the EFF ftp directory, you
can find documents about the EFF, back issues of its online newsletter,
notes on eff-issues, historical items, legal issues, current legislation,
local chapters, and a host of other material germane to the Electronic
Frontier.
While the ftp files are open to all, the EFF Library can now serve only the
members and the general public in the future, as funding and staffing
allow.
ftp archive at an increased rate throughout the rest of the summer.
Recent additions to the EFF ftp files are:
The EFF Open Platform Proposal. This is the full text of the
EFF's plan to create a national public network through the
deployment of ISDN technology.
(pub/EFF/papers/open-platform-proposal)
Howard Rhinegold's "A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community".
This meditation on what it means to be online in 1992 was
first serialized in EFFector Online.
(pub/EFF/papers/cyber/life-in-virtual-community)
Senator Al Gore's High-Tech Bill (S.2937) as introduced on July
1, 1992. This bill provides funding to both NSF and NASA to
develop technology for "digital libraries", huge data bases
that store text, imagery, video, and sound and are accessible
over computer networks like NSFNET. The bill also funds
development of prototype "digital libraries" around the
country. This is the full-text of this bill along with the
press release from Gore's office announcing the bill.
(pub/EFF/legislation/gore-bill-1992)
An information packet on the GPO/WINDO legislation before congress
as S.2813/H.R. 2772. This discusses the function of the proposed
"gateway" for online public access to government databases. From
the Taxpayers Assets Project.
(pub/EFF/legislation/gpo-windo-info)
These files are also available through WAIS as eff-documents.src. WAIS
clients are available for the Mac, PC, NeXT, X11, and GNU Emacs
environments via anonymous ftp from think.com. A "guest" WAIS client is
available by telnetting to quake.think.com and logging in as 'wais'.
To retrieve these files via email, send mail to archive-server@eff.org,
containing (in the body of the message) the command
So to get the Gore bill, you would send
ftphelp@eff.org.
-==--==--==-<>-==--==--==-
UNCLEAR ON USENET INTERNET?
Veteran members of the Internet know, through osmosis, the difference
between Internet and Usenet. Still, newcomers are often confused since the
two seem to be, at times, used interchangeably. To provide for an ultimate
answer, we turned to Chris Davis (ckd), star sysadmin at eff.org. He said:
"The definitive answer is long and mostly uninteresting except to
"The Internet is that collection of connected TCP/IP networks. Roughly
on the Internet. You may be able to get Internet mail without being on the
"USENET is that set of machines and people who interchange USENET
messages. A large number of USENET sites are on the Internet, and many
tape shipments (no kidding), and the like. Roughly speaking, you're on
USENET if you get the 'news.announce.important' newsgroup.
"They are related in that they are partially congruent and often
confused with each other :) but they are not the same network."
-==--==--==-<>-==--==--==-
Decrypting the Puzzle Palace
by
John Perry Barlow
barlow@eff.org
"A little sunlight is the best disinfectant."
--Justice Louis Brandeis
Over a year ago, in a condition of giddier innocence than I enjoy today, I
"Imagine discovering a continent so vast that it may have no other side.
exhaust, more opportunities than there will ever be entrepreneurs enough to
exploit, and a peculiar kind of real estate which expands with
One less felicitous feature of this terrain which I hadn't noticed then is
This army represents interests which are difficult to define, guards the
area against unidentified enemies, meticulously observes almost every
activity undertaken there, and continuously prevents most who inhabit its
under any democratic review.
William Gibson. The American Occupation Army of Cyberspace exists. Its
name is the National Security Agency.
anywhere people communicate with electrons. It's principal function, as
miff colleague John Gilmore puts it, is "wire-tapping the world," which it
s free to do without a warrant from any judge.
And those who are tend to be temperamentally sympathetic to its objectives
and methods. They like power, and power understands the importance of
keeping it own secrets and learning everyone else's.
Whether it is meticulously ignoring every American byte or not, the NSA is
certainly pursuing policies which will render our domestic affairs
transparent to anyone who can afford big digital hardware. Such policies
could have profound consequences on our liberty and privacy.
More to point, the role of the NSA in the area of domestic privacy needs to
be assessed in the light of other recent federal initiatives which seem
Cyberspace, whether foreign or American.
Finally it seems a highly opportune time, directly following our
NSA purportedly protects us from are as significant as the hazards its
activities present.
Like most Americans I'd never given much thought to the NSA until recently.
(Indeed its very existence was a secret for much of my life. Beltway types
used to joke that NSA stood for "No Such Agency.")
of stopping its further advance. It derives entirely from a memorandum sent
by Harry Truman on October 24, 1952 to Secretary of State Dean Acheson and
Defense Secretary Robert Lovatt. This memo, the official secrecy of which
the authority of the Secretary of Defense, and charged it with monitoring
and decoding any signal transmission relevant to the security of the United
States.
Even after I started noticing the NSA, my natural immunity to paranoia
combined with a general belief in the incompetence of all bureaucracies...
especially those whose inefficiencies are unmolested by public scrutiny...
to mute any sense of alarm. But this was before I began to understand the
them. Lately, I'm less sanguine.
Encryption may be the only reliable method for conveying privacy to the
nherently public domain of Cyberspace. I certainly trust it more than
like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.
electronic privacy, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act or ECPA. But
this law has not particular effective in those areas were electronic
eavesdropping is technically easy. This is especially true in the area of
cellular phone conversations, which, under the current analog transmission
The degree of law enforcement apprehension over secure cellular encryption
moving on a variety of fronts to see that robust electronic privacy
the current administration may be so determined to achieve this end that
they may be willing to paralyze progress in America's most promising
technologies rather than yield on it.
transmission of heretofore analog signals and the encryption of transmitted
As the communications service providers move to packet switching, fiber
optic transmission lines, digital wireless, ISDN and other advanced
techniques, what have been discrete channels of continuous electrical
mpulses, voices audible to anyone with alligator clips on the right wires,
are now becoming chaotic blasts of data packets, readily intelligible only
to the sender and receiver. This development effectively forecloses
traditional wire-tapping techniques, even as it provides new and different
opportunities for electronic surveillance.
of the digital signals dispatched on planet Earth must pass at some point
through the NSA's big sieve in Fort Meade, Maryland, 12 underground acres
of the heaviest hardware in the computing world. There, unless these
them back into their original continuity is not so difficult.
Last spring, alarmed at a future in which it would have to sort through an
endless fruit salad of encrypted bits, the FBI persuaded Senator Joseph
Biden to include language in Senate Bill 266 which would have directed
channels) to implement only such encryption methods as would assure
voice or data communications in which it took a legal interest. It was if
the government had responded to a technological leap in lock design by
The provision raised wide-spread concern in the computer community, which
and in August of last year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in
cooperation with Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and other
ndustry groups, successfully lobbied to have it removed from the bill.
Our celebration was restrained. We knew we hadn't seen the last of it. For
one thing, the movement to digital communications does create some serious
obstacles to traditional wire-tapping procedures. I fully expected that law
enforcement would be back with new proposals, which I hoped might be ones
beginning to appreciate, was the extent to which this issue had already
been engaged by the NSA in the obscure area of export controls over data
encryption algorithms.
Encryption algorithms, despite their purely defensive characteristics, have
been regarded by the government of this country as weapons of war for many
years. If they are to be employed for privacy (as opposed to
authentication) and they are any good at all, their export is licensed
under State Department's International Traffic in Arms Regulations or ITAR.
The encryption watchdog is the NSA. It has been enforcing a policy, neither
contains an encryption scheme which the NSA can't break fairly easily, it
Aside for marveling at the silliness of trying to embargo algorithms, a
February of this year. It was then that I learned about the deliberations
of an obscure group of cellular industry representatives called the Ad Hoc
Authentication Task Force, TR45.3 and of the influence which the NSA has
apparently exercised over their findings.
transmission, authentication, and privacy protection to be known by the
characteristically whimsical telco moniker IS-54B.
meeting, they recommended, and agreed not to publish, an encryption scheme
for American-made digital cellular systems which many sophisticated
observers believe to be intentionally vulnerable. It was further thought
by many observers that this "dumbing down" had been done indirect
cooperation with the NSA.
Given the secret nature of the new algorithm, its actual merits were
One cryptographic expert, one of two I spoke with who asked not to be
dentified lest the NSA take reprisals against his company, said:
"The voice privacy scheme, as opposed to the authentication scheme, is
masks" each 260 bits long. They are generated as a byproduct of the
authentication algorithm and remain fixed for the duration of a call. The
voice privacy masks are exclusive_ORed with each frame of data from the
vocoder at the transmitter. The receiver XORs the same mask with the
ncoming data frame to recover the original plain text. Anyone familiar
s."
And indeed, Whitfield Diffie, co-inventor of Public Key cryptography and
arguably the dean of this obscure field, told me this about the fixed
masks:
"Given that description of the encryption process, there is no need for the
opponents to know how the masks were generated. Routine cryptanalytic
operations will quickly determine the masks and remove them.''
Some on committee claimed that possible NSA refusal of export licensing had
no bearing on the algorithm they chose. But their decision not to publish
the entire method and expose it to cryptanalytical abuse (not to mention
ANSI certification) was accompanied by the following convoluted
"It is the belief of the majority of the Ad Hoc Group, based on our current
understanding of the export requirements, that a published algorithm would
facilitate the cracking of the algorithm to the extent that its fundamental
Now this is a weird paragraph any way you parse it, but its most singular
quality is the sudden, incongruous appearance of export requirements in a
"We're adopting this algorithm because, if we don't, the NSA will slam an
export embargo on all domestically manufactured digital cellular phones."
Obviously, the cellular phone systems manufacturers and providers are not
unnamed foreign enemy secure cellular communications is on domestic
cloaked in a mathematical veil so thin that, as one crypto-expert put it,
"Any county sheriff with the right PC-based black box will be able to
monitor your cellular conversations."
When I heard him say that, it suddenly became clear to me that, whether
consciously undertaken with that goal or not, the most important result of
the NSA's encryption embargoes has been the future convenience of domestic
law enforcement. Thanks to NSA export policies, they will be assured that,
as more Americans protect their privacy with encryption, it will be of a
n keeping good encryption out of inimical military possession. An
algorithm is somewhat less easily stopped at the border than, say, a
nuclear reactor. As William Neukom, head of Microsoft Legal puts it, "The
notion that you can control this technology is comical."
couple of sources, that the Russians have been using the possibly
uncrackable (and American) RSA algorithm in their missile launch codes for
the last ten years and that, for as little as five bucks, one can get a
ncludes both RSA and DES encryption systems.
Nevertheless, the NSA has been willing to cost American business a lot of
While it's impossible to set a credible figure on what that loss might add
up to, it's high. Jim Bidzos, whose RSA Data Security licenses RSA, points
to one major Swiss bid in which a hundred million dollar contract for
financial computer terminals went to a European vendor after American
companies were prohibited by the NSA from exporting a truly secure network.
The list of export software containing intentionally broken encryption is
also long. Lotus Notes ships in two versions. Don't count on much
Novell have been thwarted in their efforts to include RSA in their
nternational networking software, despite frequent publication of the
entire RSA algorithm in technical publications all over the world.
With hardware, the job has been easier. NSA levied against the inclusion of
a DES chip in the AS/390 series IBM mainframes in late 1990 despite the
fact that, by this time, DES was in widespread use around the world,
ncluding semi-official adoption by our official enemy, the USSR.
lately. Naively hoping that, with the collapse of the Evil Empire, the NSA
might be out of work, I then learned that, given their own vigorous crypto
not have been the threat from whom this forbidden knowledge was to be kept.
Who has the enemy been then? I started to ask around.
Cited again and again as the real object of the embargoes were Third-World
countries. terrorists and... criminals. Criminals, most generally
NSA scrutiny.
both the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) and a series
of presidential directives, beginning with one issued by President Ford
following Richard Nixon's bold misuse of the NSA, in which he explicitly
But whether or not FISA has actually limited the NSA's abilities to conduct
better question to ask was, "Who is best served by the NSA's encryption
export policies?" The answer is clear: domestic law enforcement. Was this
the result of some spook plot between NSA and, say, the Department of
Justice? Not necessarily.
Certainly in the case of the digital cellular standard, cultural congruity
between foreign intelligence, domestic law enforcement, and what somebody
more to do with the its eventual flavor than any actual whisperings along
the Potomac.
[continued in Effector Online 3.1 Part 2]
EFFector Online JULY 22, 1992 Issue 3.1 / end of Part 1
=====================================================================
EFFector Online JULY 29, 1992 Issue 3.1 / Part 2
A Publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
ISSN 1062-9424
=====================================================================
[Decrypting the Puzzle Palace by John Perry Barlow - continued - ]
Unable to get anyone presently employed by the NSA to comment on this or
any other matter and with little opportunity to assess the NSA's
congeniality toward domestic law enforcement from the inside, I
approached a couple of old hands for a highly distilled sample of
ntelligence culture.
Carter administration positions as, respectively, CIA and NSA Directors,
endowed them with considerable experience in such matters, both are
My phone conversations with Turner and Inman were amiable enough, but they
areas which are supposedly beyond its authorized field of scrutiny.
Turner started out by saying he was in no position to confirm or deny any
think I was being exactly irrational in raising the question. In fact, he
He also said that while a sub rosa arrangement between the NSA and the
Department of Justice to compromise domestic encryption would be
"injudicious," he could think of no law, including FISA (which he helped
Most alarmingly, this gentleman who has written eloquently on the hazards
of surveillance in a democracy did not seem terribly concerned that our
He said, "A threat could develop...terrorism, narcotics, whatever...where
the public would be pleased that all electronic traffic was open to
of meeting that kind of emergency."
Admiral Inman had even more enthusiasm for assertive governmental
the new cellular encryption standard, he wasn't the least disturbed to hear
that it might be flawed.
And, despite the fact that his responsibilities as NSA Director had been
talking about threats on the home front.
"The Department of Justice," he began, "has a very legitimate worry. The
major weapon against white collar crime has been the court-ordered wiretap.
He brushed off my concerns about the weakness of the cellular encryption
a very minimal amount of encipherment."
Well, I wondered, Privacy from whom?
And he seemed to regard real, virile encryption to be something rather like
a Saturday Night Special. "My answer," he said, "would be legislation
conceal criminal activity."
Wouldn't that render all encrypted traffic automatically suspect? I asked.
"Well, he said, "you could have a registry of institutions which can
legally use ciphers. If you get somebody using one who isn't registered,
then you go after him."
You can have my encryption algorithm, I thought to myself, when you pry my
cold dead fingers from its private key.
the cultural climate of the intelligence community. And these guys are the
liberals. What legal efficiencies might their Republican successors be
Without the comfortably familiar presence of the Soviets to hate and fear,
our drifting and confused hardliners to burn the Reichstag repeatedly until
they have managed to extract from our induced alarm the sort of government
This process has been under way for some time. One sees it in the war on
terrorism, against which pursuit "no liberty is absolute," as Admiral
Turner put it. This, despite the fact that, during last year for which I
You can also see it clearly under way in the War on Some Drugs. The Fourth
Amendment to the Constitution has largely disappeared in this civil war.
And among the people I spoke with, it seemed a common canon that drugs (by
need for.
One individual close to the committee said that at least some of the
aforementioned "spook wannabes" on the committee were "interested in weak
cellular encryption because they considered warrants not to be "practical"
chains and smaller cages, such privileges as secure personal communications
are increasingly regarded as expendable luxuries. As Whitfield Diffie put
t, "From the consistent way in which Americans seem to put security ahead
of freedom, I rather fear that most of them would prefer that all
electronic traffic was open to government decryption right now if they had
American cellular phone encryption standard, it seemed clear to me that
none was needed. The same results can be delivered by a cultural
"auto-conspiracy" between like-minded hardliners and cellular companies who
You don't have to be a hand-wringing libertarian like me to worry about the
America is no longer business but, as sometimes seems the case these days,
crime control.
As Ron Rivest (the "R" in RSA) said to me, "We have the largest information
based economy in the world. We have lots of reasons for wanting to protect
nformation, and weakening our encryption systems for the convenience of
law enforcement doesn't serve the national interest."
But by early March, it had become clear that this supposedly business-
oriented administration had made a clear choice to favor cops over commerce
even if the costs to the American economy were to become extremely high.
A sense of White House seriousness in this regard could be taken from their
for its encryption embargoes. Rep. Mel Levine (D-Calif.) proposed an
amendment to the Export Administration Act to transfer mass market software
controls to the Commerce Department, which would relax the rules. The
administration responded by saying that they would veto the entire bill if
the Levine amendment remained attached to it.
Even though it appeared the NSA had little to fear from Congress, the
Levine amendment may have been part of what placed the agency in a
bargaining mood for the first time. They entered into discussions with the
Software Publishers Association who, acting primarily on behalf of
Microsoft and Lotus, got to them to agree "in principle" to a streamlined
But the negotiations between the NSA and the SPA were being conducted
behind closed doors, with the NSA-imposed understanding that any agreement
they reached would be set forth only in a "confidential" letter to
Congress. As in the case of the digital cellular standard, this would
eliminate the public scrutiny by cryptography researchers which anneals
Furthermore, some cryptographers worried that the encryption key lengths to
too short to provide much defense against the sorts of brute-force
the fairly near future. And brute force has always been the NSA's strong
Whether accurate or not, the impression engendered by the style of the
NSA-SPA negotiations was not one of unassailable confidence. The lack of it
of their digital communications.
But the economic damage which the NSA-SPA agreement might cause would be
minor compared to what would result from a startling new federal
nitiative, the Department of Justice's proposed legislation on digital
telephony. If you're wondering what happened to the snooping provisions
bigger and bolder than ever.
They are contained in a sweeping proposal which have been made by the
Justice Department to the Senate Commerce Committee for legislation which
branch exchanges to ensure that the Government's ability to lawfully
ntercept communications is unimpeded by the introduction of advanced
technology."
Amazingly enough, this really means what it says: before any advance in
telecommunications technology can be deployed, the service providers and
manufacturers must assure the cops that they can tap into it. In other
and examine data packets with the same facility they have long enjoyed with
analog wire-tapping.
Attorney General, "any Commission proceeding concerning regulations,
Attorney General in a position to shut down any telecommunications advance
When I first heard of the digital telephony proposal, I assumed it was a
kind of bargaining chip. I couldn't imagine it was serious. But it now
appears they are going to the mattresses on this one.
Taken together with NSA's continued assertion of its authority over
encryption, a pattern becomes clear. The government of the United States is
abilities in the digital age that it is willing to fundamentally cripple
the American economy to do so. This may sound hyperbolic, but I believe it
s not.
The greatest technology advantage this country presently enjoys is in the
areas of software and telecommunications. Furthermore, thanks in large part
to the Internet, much of America is already wired for bytes, as significant
an economic edge in the Information Age as the existence of a railroad
to the Department of Justice the right to stop development the Net without
liberties. And all in the name of combating terrorism and drugs.
This has now gone far enough. I have always been inclined to view the
American government as pretty benign as such creatures go. I am generally
the least paranoid person I know, but there is something scary about a
As I write this, a new ad hoc working group on digital privacy, coordinated
by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is scrambling to meet the challenge.
The group includes representatives from organizations like AT&T, the
Regional Bells, IBM, Microsoft, the Electronic Mail Association and about
thirty other companies and public interest groups.
Under the direction of Jerry Berman, EFF's Washington office director, and
John Podesta, a capable lobbyist and privacy specialist who helped draft
the ECPA, this group intends to stop the provisions in digital telephony
We also intend to work with federal law enforcement officials to address
their legitimate concerns. We don't dispute their need to conduct some
electronic surveillance, but we believe this can be assured by more
We are also preparing a thorough examination of the NSA's encryption export
attempting to do, America's digital industries have a strong self-interest
n banding together to bring the NSA's procedures and objectives into the
Finally, we are hoping to open a dialog with the NSA. We need to develop a
better understanding of their perception of the world and its threats. Who
are they guarding us against and how does encryption fit into that
endeavor? Despite our opposition to their policies on encryption export, we
assume that NSA operations have some merit. But we would like to be able to
We strongly encourage any organization which might have a stake in the
future of digital communication to become involved. Letters expressing your
concern may be addressed to: Sen. Ernest Hollings, Chairman, Senate
Commerce Committee, U.S. Senate, Washington, DC and to Don Edwards,
Chairman, Subcommitee on Constitutional Rights, House Judiciary Committee.
(I would appreciate hearing those concerns myself. Feel free to copy me
Avenue SE, Suite 303, Washington, DC 20003, 202/544- 9237, FAX:
Second Street, Cambridge, MA 02141,617/864- 0665, eff-request@eff.org.
The legal right to express oneself is meaningless if there is no secure
medium through which that expression may travel. By the same token, the
those opinions with others of like mind without the government listening in.
Even if you trust the current American government, as I am still largely
nclined to, there is a kind of corrupting power in the ability to create
to licensing authority for all communications technology would give it a
control of information distribution rarely asserted over English-speaking
Are there threats, foreign or domestic, which are sufficiently grave to
merit the conveyance of such vast legal and technological might? And even
f the NSA and FBI may be trusted with such power today, will they always
be trustworthy? Will we be able to do anything about it if they aren't?
Senator Frank Church said of NSA technology in 1975 words which are more
urgent today:
"That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people
and no American would have any privacy left. There would be no place to
that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to
mpose total tyranny. There would be no way to fight back, because the most
careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no
matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to
know. Such is the capacity of this technology."
San Francisco, California
May, 1992
Reprinted from Communications of the ACM, June 1992
by permission of the author
-==--==--==-<>-==--==--==-
from THE TAO TE CHIP
by Jeffrey Sorrenson
sorensen@ecse.rpi.edu
(with help from Steven Mitchell and Lao Tzu)
2
When users see one GUI as beautiful,
other user interfaces become ugly.
When users see some programs as winners,
other programs become lossage.
High level and assembler depend on each other.
Double and float cast to each other.
High-endian and low-endian define each other.
While and until follow each other.
Therefore the Guru
and teaches without saying anything.
Warnings arise and he lets them come;
He has but doesn't possess,
acts but doesn't expect.
When his work is done, he deletes it.
That is why it lasts forever.
80
ts users will be content.
They enjoy hacking their code
and don't waste time implementing
labor-saving shell scripts.
Since they dearly love their accounts,
they aren't interested in other machines.
There may be telnet, rlogin, and ftp,
but these don't access any hosts.
There may be an arsenal of cracks and malware,
but nobody ever uses them.
take pleasure in being with their newsgroups,
And even though the next system is so close
that users can hear its key clicks and biff beeps,
they are content to die of old age
-==--==--==-<>-==--==--==-
MEMBERSHIP IN THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION
becoming a member now. Members receive our quarterly newsletter,
EFFECTOR, our bi-weekly electronic newsletter, EFFector Online (if you
believe that support should be freely given, you can receive these
things even if you do not elect to become a member.
Our memberships are $20.00 per year for students, $40.00 per year for
Our privacy policy: The Electronic Frontier Foundation will never, under
any circumstances, sell any part of its membership list. We will, from
time to time, share this list with other non-profit organizations whose
explicit permission, we assume that you do not wish your membership
---------------- EFF MEMBERSHIP FORM ---------------
Mail to: The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Inc.
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Cambridge, MA 02141
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