From: jya@pipeline.com (John Young)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
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UTC Datetime: 1996-06-10 18:46:11 UTC
Raw Date: Tue, 11 Jun 1996 02:46:11 +0800
From: jya@pipeline.com (John Young)
Date: Tue, 11 Jun 1996 02:46:11 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: TWP on Crypto Policy
Message-ID: <199606101259.MAA01702@pipe5.t1.usa.pipeline.com>
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The Washington Post, June 10, 1996, p. A18.
Global Village Cops?
What will be the long-term effect of Internet technologies
on global law enforcement? The amazing story of Bill and
Anna Young, a k a Leslie Rogge and Judy Kay Wilson, offers
one possible scenario. The pseudonymous Youngs, residents
of Guatemala who the FBI says have been on a decade-long
run from U.S. justice since Mr. Rogge was convicted of a
string of bank robberies and other offenses, turned
themselves in to authorities after a neighbor recognized
Mr. Rogge's face on the FBI home page's Most Wanted list.
According to a story first told in the Guatemala Weekly,
the person who recognized him was a newly Internet-wired
14-year-old.
The vision of the future evoked by this story, of a world
in which the familiar "global village" becomes a place not
just of instant communication but of neighborly nosiness
and where no one can just melt into the crowd, is
reassuring and unnerving in about equal proportions. (What
if it were a network of hit men or an authoritarian
government seeking a dissident, rather than the FBI, making
use of this powerful technology?) But it's also worth
keeping in mind that, other than the romance of the
technology, it doesn't represent that great an advance on
current global media that have made celebrities or
fugitives' faces familiar to a vast public -- just ask
Salman Rushdie. The Rogge nabbing is the first that the FBI
credits to its home page specifically, but TV's "America's
Most Wanted" has scored similar coups.
The impossibility of predicting the exact shape of these
extensions of policing is relevant as well to a report that
the National Research Council recently issued on another
computer technology issue -- the vexed matter of whether to
ease export controls on encryption software, which encodes
information sent electronically so that only a user with a
key can decipher it.
The government until now has resisted lifting controls on
"uncrackable" encryption software -- that is, codes that
are too complex to be broken by brute force -- unless the
industry agrees to deposit keys in an escrow arrangement
with a third party so the government can seek and obtain a
warrant to read encoded communications if necessary.
Software makers, meanwhile, are pushing hard to have these
restrictions eased. The research council, an arm of the
generally neutral National Academy of Sciences, sought to
bridge the gap between industry interests and such
government agencies as the FBI and national security
agencies, whose case, they say, is based largely on
classified matter that can't be publicly discussed.
Part of the report's conclusion, which favors the easing
though not the abolition of current restrictions, is that
wider use of encryption technology will actually *help*
national security and law enforcement because more data,
economic and otherwise, will be secure to begin with. But
if the news of the changing terrain tells anything, it is
that it is far too soon to base arguments on such a
premise. Our own sense on encryption is that the national
security and law enforcement questions remain too important
to be sacrificed lightly, despite the considerable economic
interests of the parties on the other side. But the world
of Internet law enforcement is still taking shape. Whatever
the public conclusion on encryption, the debate should not
rest on any assumptions about what that shape will be.
--
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