Re: CLIPPER COMPROMIZED?

Just got word from the RISKS folks that the upcoming issue has a
denouncement of the Network World article, from Denning.  She says she
checked up on it, and it's BS.  This is pretty much obvious, but it still
leaves open the question of who originally came up with this rumor to
monger, and why?  It looks almost like an act of desperation.  That's my
interest in this.  If it was something that could be taken seriously, it
would be a good bit of propaganda work, truth or falsehood aside. But the
entire short article smacks of conspiracy theorist ranting.  I hope this
sort of stuff isn't going to become more frequent, or it may make
anti-Clipper people look, from the outside, like kooks.

-- 
Stanton McCandlish * mech@eff.org * Electronic Frontier Found. OnlineActivist
"In a 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 it."
- Philip Elmer-Dewitt, "Who Should Keep the Keys", TIME, Mar. 14 1994

Stanton McCandlish wrote:

> Just got word from the RISKS folks that the upcoming issue has a
> denouncement of the Network World article, from Denning.  She says she
> checked up on it, and it's BS.  This is pretty much obvious, but it still
> leaves open the question of who originally came up with this rumor to
> monger, and why?  It looks almost like an act of desperation.  That's my
> interest in this.  If it was something that could be taken seriously, it
> would be a good bit of propaganda work, truth or falsehood aside. But the
> entire short article smacks of conspiracy theorist ranting.  I hope this
> sort of stuff isn't going to become more frequent, or it may make
> anti-Clipper people look, from the outside, like kooks.
> 

Since I've seen it cited by Dave Banisar, yourself, and others,
including direct excerpting from the source, to me it is "fair game"
for spreading far and wide!

I'll be interviewed on a radio show in the near future, and I fully
intend to let the listeners know about the intrinsic vulnerability of
centralized systems like the Clipper key escrow system to theft or
compromising of the keys. Whether details have already leaked or not
is beside the point: a centralized system takes away our own
responsibility for our privacy and places a master or skeleton key to
our lives in the hands of the state....a state which has shown itself
to be corrupt at various levels and in various unpredictable ways. 

Frankly, I don't consider Dorothy Denning to be an unbiased source in
this matter, so I will look with some skepticism at any "denunciation"
of this report. By her. And I hope here reasoning is more than "I have
been told." (Not to pick on Denning, but she has demonstrated a
credulous approach to accepting the word of law enforcement in the
past, and has repeatedly referred to law enforcement's greater need
for access to private matters and how things "they know" would scare
the rest of us if only we could be told about them.)

As for this stuff making anti-Clipper folks sound like "conspiracy
theorists," just what is Clipper and Digital Telephony but a
conspiracy to crush privacy as we know it today and usher in the
surveillance state?

Some conspiracies are more than theories.


--Tim May


-- 
..........................................................................
Timothy C. May         | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,  
tcmay@netcom.com       | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
408-688-5409           | knowledge, reputations, information markets, 
W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA  | black markets, collapse of governments.
Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available.
"National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

Ok, so we have a wire service report citing unnamed sources that the
gov't is trying to find out if Ames could have had access to Clipper,
and Denning citing unnamed sources that Ames probably didn't have
access to Clipper...

IMHO, that's roughly a tie in the credibility race, especially given
Denning's known biases on the matter.

At this stage in the clipper deployment, it would not be hard for them
to "recall" all the outstanding clipper/capstone/etc. chips for an,
umm, "bug fix", which installed a new set of S-boxes & a new family
key.

In any event, anyone who had compromised clipper would be a fool to
show his hand now.. it would make a lot more sense to wait until
deployment was seriously under way, and clipperphones had gotten into
the hands (& electron microscopes :-) ) of at least some anti-clipper
activists... that way, it would be impossible for the gov't to dismiss
such a compromise as a hoax.

					- Bill