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From the bridge of the aircraft carrier Akagi, Adm. Chuichi Nagumo peered across
the tranquil Pacific toward Midway Island. Three hours had passed since he
launched 108 planes against the tiny atoll. A victory here, the Pearl Harbor veteran
knew, would allow his fleet to advance on Hawaii and then threaten the West Coast
of the United States. Midway would be Japan's passageway east.
Even though his air strike at dawn had destroyed Midway's fuel supply and
decimated the island's fighter squadrons, Nagumo was worried. One of his scouts
had reported an enemy aircraft carrier 200 miles away and nearing. No carriers
should be nearby, Nagumo thought. He expected no U.S. ships and little resistance.
Midway was to be an easy target, like Pearl Harbor had been six months before.
Nagumo didn't know about the codebreaking genius of the Combat Intelligence
Unit, a group of three U.S. cryptanalysts in Pearl Harbor's Navy yard. They monitored
all major and most minor Japanese fleet circuits and had succeeded in tunneling
into the Japanese JN25b cipher and its internal time and place encoding. On May
28, 1942, six days before Nagumo aimed his Zeroes at Midway,
the codebreakers handed Adm. Chester Nimitz the complete tactical plan the
Japanese would use in
the battle.
On the morning of June 4, three carriers from Nimitz's Pacific fleet waited on
Admiral Nagumo's flank. Still unaware of the extent of the threat to the northeast,
Nagumo recalled his interceptors, which were low on gas after swarming on Midway.
He decided they should land, refuel and replace their bombs with the 250 kg
torpedoes that could do more damage to enemy ships. The laborious process took
two hours.
The delay proved deadly. U.S. planes attacked soon afterwards. Dive-bombers
from the Enterprise and Yorktown screamed down and soon three of Nagumo's four
carriers were ablaze. Nagumo would say later of the Soryu, "Fires enveloped the
whole ship in no time." She
was abandoned 30 minutes later. Nagumo's last carrier, Hiryu, sank the next day.
Thanks to the Pearl Harbor cryptanalysts, Japan's eastward advance had been
halted. The remnants of the once-proud First Air Fleet limped west in hasty retreat.
An inferior U.S. force had defeated
a Japanese armada. American codebreaking had turned the tide of a war.
World War II was when cryptology, the science of reading and
writing secrets, came into its own. By cracking the Nazis' Enigma machine, Allied
cryptanalysts saved the world a year of war in Europe. The decoding of Japan's
diplomatic ciphers lent a sorely needed edge to the Allied war efforts in the Pacific.
Codebreaking also led to the United States shooting down Adm. Isoroku
Yamamoto's personal airplane near Guadalcanal, a move that struck a heavy blow to
Japanese morale.
Modern wars have highlighted the military benefits of codemaking and
codebreaking--together called cryptology--but ciphers and codes have existed for
millennia. Julius Caesar wrote to Cicero in a cipher similar to Usenet's ROT-13 that
replaced letters with the characters three places further down the alphabet. The
Greeks invented a cryptographic signaling system that replaced letters with two-digit
numbers from 11 to 55. Roger Bacon, an English monk who lived in the 13th
century, wrote: "A man is crazy who writes a secret in any other way than one which
will conceal it from the vulgar."
Modern Encryption
For all its bewildering jargon, the concept of cryptography is straightforward: a
sender wants to write a message and prevent an eavesdropper from understanding
it. This can be done through encryption and
encipherment, which scramble or rearrange the components of a message, or
through a code in which one phrase represents another. Modern computers use
ciphers.
Ever since the ciphers of the Greeks and Romans, covert writing techniques have
relied on the sender and recipient holding identical copies of a "key," usually a
secret phrase that both parties must agree on before they can communicate. (The
Confederates showed remarkable optimism but little prescience when choosing the
phrase "COMPLETE VICTORY" as a key for Civil War ciphers.) That technique,
however, limits the system's usefulness. If Alice wants to send a message
to Bob and they haven't decided on a key, how can they communicate privately?
They can't. An eavesdropper could intercept a key if Bob sent it
to Alice. Until, at least, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman invented public-key
cryptography in 1975.
Now Alice can send a private message to Bob, even if they've never met. In
public-key cryptography, each correspondent owns a
private key and a public key, which often is published in a directory. Think of the
technique as creating a public mailbox; anyone can drop letters in the mailbox, but
only the person with the right key can remove them. This development marked the
end of special key couriers with black bags and the beginning of software like Phil
Zimmermann's Pretty Good Privacy.
Law enforcement agencies and the National Security Agency weren't exactly
pleased by these advancements. They contend that crypto is dangerous in the
wrong hands, which is why the Clinton administration continues to treat encryption
products as though they were munitions. For export purposes, crypto is treated as a
B-2 stealth bomber or an M-1 Abrams tank. An executive order, which succeeded
the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), requires firms to seek licenses
to ship crypto overseas.
The U.S. government's view stems from when encryption was largely the province
of soldiers and spies. Indeed, the science of cryptology owes much of its
advancement to codebreakers and codemakers who worked for governments. But
the world has changed. Computers are no longer a military monopoly. Strong crypto
is needed online. Public-key cryptography, besides ensuring that your messages are
secure, can also identify who you're communicating with or buying from online. It
provides the protocols for scrambling credit-card numbers and generating digital
coins. It allows digital signatures, proofs of identity online, digital time stamps and
even secure electronic voting. It lets anonymous remailers exist. It provides for
secure telnet connections. Crypto provides the foundation
and steel girders for an information society.
Munition or Net-Necessity?
Encryption presents the Feds with an unwelcome dilemma: It yields hefty benefits
when used to secure networks, but presents law enforcement agencies with real
drawbacks when agents try in vain to read a suspect's seized e-mail.
This schizophrenic policy betrayed itself when the Clinton administration
introduced the Clipper Chip in April 1993. The White House tried to pass off the
device as offering users superior encryption capabilities at the small price of
ensuring continued government access to encrypted communications. The plan,
crafted by the NSA, was for the government to hold master copies of keys "in
escrow" until needed by law enforcement. The scheme met with savage opposition
and the Clipper Chip soon sunk.
That miserable failure hasn't prevented FBI director Louis Freeh from launching
his own attacks on crypto. In alarmist speeches, he repeatedly has linked strong
encryption to terrorists such as the Oklahoma City bombers. Freeh told Congress
that "unbreakable encryption" will "seriously and fundamentally threaten" public
safety. "The potential use of such robust encryption products by a vast array of
criminals and terrorists to conceal their criminal communications and information
poses an extremely serious and, in my view, unacceptable threat to public safety,"
he said. (Attorney General Janet Reno and Jamie Gorelick, deputy attorney general,
have echoed the FBI chief, and documents that the Electronic Privacy Information
Center obtained under the Freedom of Information Act demonstrate that the bureau
would like to outlaw encryption that doesn't have a backdoor for the government.)
Still, Freeh speaks some truth. If crypto is widespread, it will hinder the
FBI's ability to wiretap. It will allow miscreants to encrypt files in a manner
impervious to prosecutors' most determined attacks. It will make it more
difficult for the NSA to scan international phone calls in bulk for code words that
hint at illicit activity. It will hinder convictions--but then again, so do
Miranda rights. To Freeh, controls on encryption are a matter of restoring the
"balance" that's tilting away from law enforcement. "In a very fundamental way,
conventional encryption has the effect of upsetting the delicate legal balance of the
Fourth Amendment, since when a judge issues a search warrant it will be of no
practical value when this type of encryption is encountered," he said.
What Freeh neglects to mention is how the scales are already tipped in favor of
the FBI. Modern communications technologies make it possible for law enforcement
agents to collect an unprecedented amount of information on ordinary citizens
without their knowledge. Digital technology allows governments to do a much more
thorough job of monitoring an ordinary person's actions and opinions than ever
before. If the Justice Department ransacks your home, you'll know it. Not so when
your communications are digital and are culled from a mail server without
your knowledge. Crypto restores the balance of privacy.
"It's an effort by the government to permanently shift the power in favor of
surveillance," ACLU privacy guru Don Haines says. "This occurs in a digital medium,
where for the first time we can make Big Brother real. Before, the manpower
required was prohibitive. Now it's digital. You set your computers to search for a
particular sequence of bits."
This view is not new. Thirty years ago, Alan Westin wrote in his book Privacy
and Freedom that "the issue of privacy raised by computerization is whether
the increased collection and processing of information for diverse public and private
purposes, if not carefully controlled, could lead to a sweeping power of surveillance
by government over individual lives and organizational activity."
His remarks would prove prophetic.
U.S. Businesses: Out of Business?
American businesses have launched their own offensive to
support encryption. They contend that their overseas competitors aren't hindered by
ITAR and are free to sell strong encryption around the globe. Execs have told
Congress for years that current regulations cost U.S. industry millions. They point to
RSA Data Security's decision to license its patents to NTT, a Japanese firm. They
warn that European or Asian software makers may drive U.S. firms off the encryption
playing field forever.
The White House reacted swiftly to the complaints. Clinton recently appointed a
crypto-ambassador to lobby foreign governments to comply with U.S. rules and
move toward a global framework requiring key escrow. If successful, the move would
nullify the industry's argument; after all, foreign firms would be equally hobbled.
"What we need to do, very clearly, is to spend a lot of time with other countries,"
says William Reinsch, Commerce Department undersecretary for export
administration.
The debate grew even hotter when Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Montana) introduced a
bill last spring that would lift export controls. With White House arm-twisting--some
reports say Clinton himself worked the phones--and adept lobbying by the Justice
Department, the legislation perished. Sen. Jim Exon (D-Nebraska), proud sponsor of
the Communications Decency Act, personally dealt the death blow by blocking the
proposal from leaving the Commerce Committee. Burns plans to reintroduce "Pro-
CODE" legislation this year.
The other way to skirt the export embargo is through the courts. The Electronic
Frontier Foundation scored an early victory in its legal attack on the regulations last
December when a Federal judge in San Francisco ruled that ITAR was
unconstitutional. Another case is moving through the D.C. Federal appeals court,
which heard oral arguments last month.
Clinton responded to these legislative and judicial attacks by signing an executive
order on Nov. 15, 1996 that he billed as a "compromise," but in truth it only
transferred jurisdiction over encryption exports from the State Department to the
Commerce Department. The regulations remain almost entirely the same. Clinton
wrote at the time, almost parroting Freeh, that "encryption products, when used
outside the United States, can jeopardize our foreign policy and national security
interests...The exportation of encryption products accordingly must be controlled to
further U.S. foreign policy objectives, and promote our national security, including
the protection of the safety of U.S. citizens abroad."
Attached to Clinton's executive order was another reason for privacy advocates to
cry foul: a "key recovery" proposal. It's Clipper with a twist, a divide-and-conquer
strategy designed to splinter an industry previously united in opposition. It slightly
relaxed rules on exporting crypto only for those businesses that pledge to devise a
key escrow system ensuring government access to keys. That presents Silicon
Valley companies with a kind of unholy prisoner's dilemma--if you don't buy into this
plan, your competitor will. Faced with the prospect of hanging together
or hanging separately, some hardware manufacturers already have signed up.
Security through Complex Mathematics
Ironically, the Federal government may have done more than anyone else to
further the spread of encryption. In 1975, it unveiled the Data Encryption Standard
(DES), arguably still the world's most popular data-scrambling algorithm. It proved
reasonably fast and apparently secure, even after the National Security Agency
weakened the final version. However, the NSA had made a crucial mistake: they
believed the National Institute of Standards and Technology would publish
specifications only for a hardware version of DES.
Instead, enough information appeared in the Federal Register to allow
programmers to write DES applications. Soon, they became widely available,
bringing reasonable digital privacy to anyone with a personal computer. The
explosion of personal computers allowed more people to encrypt files with DES than
the NSA ever imagined. Chastened officials say privately that, from the standpoint of
national security, DES was the worst mistake the NSA ever made.
The debate over what encryption products can be exported revolves around the
strength of the application's key; longer keys are more difficult for an attacker to
break. The Commerce Department permits firms to export 40-bit DES, or 56-bit
DES with a pledge to develop "key recovery" products.
Symmetric algorithms like DES use keys often ranging from 40 bits to 128 bits,
with an 8-bit key having 28--or 256--possible values. Guessing that key takes 256
attempts, with a 50 percent chance of finding the correct key after 128 tries.
Beware short key lengths: an attacker with custom hardware can crack a 40-bit DES
key in milliseconds and a 56-bit key in just minutes. But a 128-bit key requires an
adversary to wait perhaps 1017 years--or longer than the known age of the
universe! No wonder the NSA is lamenting. (Public-key cryptosystems like PGP
calculate the security of key lengths differently. A 128-bit PGP key is woefully
inadequate; a 1024-bit PGP key is reasonably safe.)
Crypto-Revolutionaries
The debate swirling through Capitol Hill conference rooms and the corridors of the
White House revolves around one basic question: What role should the government
play in regulating encryption?
The founding fathers might be startled by the Byzantine rules. After all, some
revolutionaries were cryptographers themselves. Benjamin Franklin in 1781 crafted
a substitution cipher based on a 682-character French phrase. James Madison
created a code replacing words with two- and three-digit numbers that he used until
1793.
But by far the most remarkable cryptologist of the Revolutionary War was the
author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, who between 1790
and 1800 invented a cipher system so far ahead of its time that it remained in use
even into the late 20th century.
He called it his "wheel cypher." One design consisted of a six-inch rod with 36
wheels on it, each with an alphabet scrambled in a different order. The wheels can
be rearranged for different correspondents for a total of 36 factorial, or 37 x 1040
possible combinations.
In The Codebreakers, historian David Kahn writes: "Jefferson's wheel
cypher was far and away the most advanced devised in his day...Had the President
recommended his own system to Secretary of State James Madison, he would have
endowed his country with a method of secret communication that would almost
certainly have withstood any cryptanalytic attack of those days. Instead
he appears to have filed andforgotten it."
To Jefferson, the will and welfare of the people--not federal bureaucrats--were the
prop and purpose of government. His deepest trust lay in the wisdom of citizens to
use freedom wisely and in a belief that the essence of democracy was a central
government limited in power. Perhaps, when contemplating encryption regulations,
Bill Clinton could learn something from his renowned predecessor.
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