Word: clipper
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Thus the stage was set for one of the most bizarre technology-policy battles ever waged: the Clipper Chip war. Lined up on one side are the three-letter cloak-and-dagger agencies -- the NSA, the CIA and the FBI -- and key policymakers in the Clinton Administration (who are taking a surprisingly hard line on the encryption issue). Opposing them is an equally unlikely coalition of computer firms, civil libertarians, conservative columnists and a strange breed of cryptoanarchists who call themselves the cypherpunks...
...center is the Clipper Chip, a semiconductor device that the NSA developed and wants installed in every telephone, computer modem and fax machine. The chip combines a powerful encryption algorithm with a "back door" -- the cryptographic equivalent of the master key that opens schoolchildren's padlocks when they forget their combinations. A "secure" phone equipped with the chip could, with proper authorization, be cracked by the government. Law-enforcement agencies say they need this capability to keep tabs on drug runners, terrorists and spies. Critics denounce the Clipper -- and a bill before Congress that would require phone companies to make...
...Time/CNN poll of 1,000 Americans conducted last week by Yankelovich Partners, two-thirds said it was more important to protect the privacy of phone calls than to preserve the ability of police to conduct wiretaps. When informed about the Clipper Chip, 80% said they opposed...
Rather than outlaw PGP and other such programs, a policy that would probably be unconstitutional, the Administration is taking a marketing approach. By using its purchasing power to lower the cost of Clipper technology, and by vigilantly enforcing restrictions against overseas sales of competing encryption systems, the government is trying to make it difficult for any alternative schemes to become widespread. If Clipper manages to establish itself as a market standard -- if, for example, it is built into almost every telephone, modem and fax machine sold -- people who buy a nonstandard system might find themselves with an untappable phone...
That's still a big if. Zimmermann is already working on a version of PGP for voice communications that could compete directly with Clipper, and if it finds a market, similar products are sure to follow. "The crypto genie is out of the bottle," says Steven Levy, who is writing a book about encryption. If that's true, even the NSA may not have the power to put it back...