From: "John Kelsey" <kelsey@plnet.net>
Date: Fri, 18 Sep 1998 12:47:47 +0800
To: <rah@shipwright.com>
Subject: Re: Questions for Magaziner?
Message-ID: <199809181747.MAA03503@email.plnet.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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> From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
> To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net; cryptography@c2.net; dcsb@ai.mit.edu
> Subject: Questions for Magaziner?
> Date: Thursday, September 17, 1998 11:38 PM
 
> Anyway, In light of more recent crypto-shenanigans from Billary,
and the
> fact that this thing's a small crowd, I figured I'd ask if anyone
on these
> lists had a question they wanted me to ask him.

Here's a question I would like to ask, in a rather rough form:

There has been a lot of talk by the administration about ``striking a
balance'' 
between citizens privacy concerns and the interests of police and spy
agencies.
Can you give us some concrete examples of what tradeoffs between
these two you
consider reasonable?  For example, what benefits to society would be
worth making
all private communications available to the FBI or NSA?  Would it be
a worthwhile
trade to the citizens of the US if we could double the street price
of cocaine, at 
the cost of essentially all phone calls being recorded and subject to
monitoring at 
any time?  How about cutting the (already barely measureable) risk of
dying from a 
terrorist act in half?  

My complaint with their rhetoric is that they always talk about these
tradeoffs and
about striking a balance, but we never seem to see any balance being
struck.  Striking
a balance means acknowledging that some societal benefits aren't
worth giving up our
privacy.  Will doubling the street price of cocaine improve my life
much?  It sure 
doesn't look like it will to me.  How about cutting my risk of dying
from a terrorist
act?  This is already much smaller than my risk of dying in a plane
crash; how much lower 
does it need to go?  (There is also the issue of whether any claimed
set of benefits
can be accomplished by key-escrow, or for that matter by putting a
videocamera and 
microphone in every home.  But that's a different issue.)

Of course, there are a bunch of problems with trying to analyze
violating fundamental
individual rights for some perceived social benefit, but I don't
think their basic argument 
can work, even if we grant that this sort of tradeoff is a legitimate
thing for governments
to do.  The tradeoffs we've seen offered have not given much weight
to citizens' desires for
privacy.  Consider the Clipper chip, the continued use of export
controls to slow down deployment of encryption in the US and
worldwide, the FBI's CALEA demands (including their
demand a few years ago to be able to listen in on 1/2% of all ongoing
calls in urban areas), 
etc.  We haven't seen any attempt to strike a balance so far, just an
attempt to claim 
some bureaucratic turf.


> Cheers,
> Bob Hettinga

--John Kelsey, kelsey@counterpane.com / kelsey@plnet.net
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