From: Brad Dolan <bdolan@use.usit.net>
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Message Hash: ed4142345ab17ac45d7a43cd01f9baea946d29c297b1178aeb6fddf4b428f659
Message ID: <Pine.SOL.3.91.960814075845.22879A-100000@use.usit.net>
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UTC Datetime: 1996-08-14 15:32:13 UTC
Raw Date: Wed, 14 Aug 1996 23:32:13 +0800
From: Brad Dolan <bdolan@use.usit.net>
Date: Wed, 14 Aug 1996 23:32:13 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Schlafly on crypto
Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.3.91.960814075845.22879A-100000@use.usit.net>
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Subject: Clinton Is Trying to be Big Brother -- Phyllis Schlafly Column 8/8/96
Clinton Is Trying to be Big Brother
August 8, 1996 by Phyllis Schlafly
We hope the appropriate government agencies will soon solve the
recent terrorist crimes and punish the criminals. But all
Americans who care about civil liberties should vigorously resist
President Clinton's attempt to use the terrorist attacks as an
excuse to carry on his all-out war against the personal privacy of
law-abiding Americans.
This mind-set was first revealed in the Clinton health care bill,
which would have given the government computer access to the
medical records of all Americans. Fortunately, that totalitarian
takeover of the health care industry was rejected.
The Clinton Administration's education legislation now pending in
Congress would put personal information about all schoolchildren
-- academic, medical, attitudinal, behavioral, and family -- into
an expanded Labor Market Information database available to the
government, as well as to prospective employers.
Now the Clinton Administration is trying to make it illegal for
individual Americans to have private conversations with one
another. That's the real meaning of its effort to control
encryption technology, and it's a direct assault on the First
Amendment.
It would be downright ridiculous to assert that the First
Amendment guarantees our right to speak in public but not in
private. It would be just as ridiculous to say that we have
freedom to speak in words that the government can understand, but
not in words the government can't decipher.
Americans have the right to speak to one another in private,
behind closed doors, and we should likewise have the right to
speak to one another in code and to put our coded messages on
computer in a process called encryption. Americans would not
tolerate the government opening and reading the letters we send
through the mails, and we should not tolerate the government
opening and reading our encrypted, or coded, messages sent via
computer.
Yet, Attorney General Janet Reno, FBI Director Louis Freeh, and
Vice President Al Gore are all demanding the authority to read our
encrypted messages. In a speech to the Commonwealth Club of
California, Reno bluntly stated her demand for "ensuring law
enforcement access to encrypted data.''
Reno boasted that there is "a consensus'' that the government
should create a system known as "Key Escrow'' (i.e., a supposedly
"neutral third party''), to which all Americans should be forced
to "entrust'' the keys to their encrypted messages, and to which
the government would have access. On the contrary, there is no
such consensus.
Do you trust Janet Reno with access to your private messages? Do
you trust the FBI to keep your files confidential?
The Clinton Administration is already doing 30 to 40 percent more
federal telephone wiretaps and other electronic surveillance than
the last year of the Bush Administration. Those figures don't even
include national security wiretaps or the hundreds of extensions
granting more time for wiretap orders already issued.
FBI Director Freeh wrote the New York Times last November that
"There is no intention to expand the number of wiretaps or the
extent of wiretapping." Four months later, FBI documents revealed
that the FBI does, in fact, plan to increase electronic
surveillance 54 percent by 1998 and 130 percent by 2004.
On July 12, Al Gore announced that the Administration will
continue to push for the adoption of a massive public key
infrastructure to give the government access to all encrypted
communications. In a blatant bid for a police-state surveillance
society, Gore warned about "the dangers of unregulated encryption
technology."
A neutral panel of the National Research Council was set up to
make policy recommendations about encryption. The panel called on
the government to abandon its efforts to restrict encryption.
The NSC panel concluded that increased use of encryption would
enhance our national security, not diminish it. Thirteen out of
its 16 members had security clearances with access to secret
information, and they saw no national security reason to justify
the Clinton policy.
The Clinton Administration bases its campaign to control private
encryption on the alleged need to fight crime through wiretapping.
However, the NSC panel concluded that the ability of the private
sector to transfer confidential financial and other data over the
information highway without interception is far more important.
New technologies have given government awesome power to spy on
individuals. The Filegate investigation accidentally uncovered the
shocking news that, as soon as Bill Clinton entered the White
House in 1993, he secretly spent $400,000 on software to create a
highly sophisticated computer database to track detailed
political, financial, attitudinal, and personal biographical
information on 200,000 people, including members of Congress and
the media. Known as WHODB for White House Office Data Base, the
system was nicknamed Big Brother.
Encryption is a First Amendment issue, not a crime issue. If the
Clinton Administration is allowed to control encryption, it would
be the biggest expansion of federal power since the passage of the
Income Tax Amendment in 1913.
EAGLE FORUM -- eagle@eagleforum.org
PO Box 618
Alton, IL 62002
Phone: 618-462-5415
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