Re: Denning's misleading statements

At 10:51 PM 1/27/96, Alan Olsen wrote:

>Why is it that whenever I read Denning's pronouncements I feel like I am
>reading something from a villainess in an Ayn Rand novel?
>
>Denning has become the epitome of the pure authoritarian government world
>view.  Analysis of her viewpoints makes me more of an anarchist every time I
>read her rants.  It is that smarmy "We know better than you do" with

One of the interesting things about the whole crypto debate, going back at
least to the Clipper announcement (and actually some months before) has
been that the pro-restrictions, pro-GAK side of the argument has almost no
defenders! Except for David Sternlight, Dorothy Denning, and Donn Parker
("attack of the killer Ds"?), there are almost no public spokesmen for the
pro-restriction, pro-GAK side.

She has written numerous pro-GAK position papers for various conferences,
journals (including the "Proc. of the ACM"), and other fora. Where are the
other defenders? Even the producers of GAKked products are fairly careful
to finesse their positions by saying they are only doing what they are
doing because the government is paying them to, or because the export laws
leave them few other options.

I've never met Dorothy Denning, so I hesitate to characterize her as a
villainess. But certainly she's the only noted cryptographer I know of
who's gone so far out on a limb to defend a position the vast majority of
computer scientists, civil libertarians, and cryptographers scoff at. (And
I don't just mean it is we libertarians and civil libertarians who are
scoffing, I mean that nearly every noted expert who has carefully reviewed
the various schemes to control crypto and to provide GAK has found them to
be essentially unenforceable except via draconian police state methods, and
maybe not even then.)

I personally believe her estrangement from the mainstream position these
last several years and her apparent close association with the
inside-the-Beltway crowd has actually skewed her judgment, that she is no
longer evaluating policies and capabilities based on reasonable objective,
academic analysis.

Her views, and even many of her examples, are very close the views and
examples used by FBI Director Louis Freeh in his testimony to Congress a
few years ago. (I scanned and OCRed this testimony as a favor to Whit
Diffie, so in reviewing the text for OCR corrections, I became very
familiar with Freeh's fear-inducing testimony.)

I don't mean this as a cheap shot against her, but I would not be surprised
to see her take on some sort of "Undersecretary for National Information
Infrastrucure Affairs" or somesuch position in the next Administration (no
matter which side wins the election). She's become a player in the
Washington game.


>Depends on your ability to challenge the status quo.  A vague law with lots
>of harsh but undefined penalties is much more effective than something that
>is rigidly defined.  With rigidly defined laws, you can find loopholes and
>ways to push the envelope.  With vague rules, people will tend to err on the
>side of caution.

Psychologists call this "random reinforcement." A plethora of vague laws
about intent, conspiracy, and threshold have made this the norm. When there
are 25,983 distinct laws on the books, what else is to be expected?

>"Hey, we found this Tim May guy down at the school playground selling crypto
>to the kids!  Let's throw the book at him!"

"This could not have been me, Your Holiness! I would never think to _sell_
cryptography to the kids--I would give them free samples first."

--Tim

Boycott espionage-enabled software!
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1  | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

Timothy C. May writes:
> One of the interesting things about the whole crypto debate, going back at
> least to the Clipper announcement (and actually some months before) has
> been that the pro-restrictions, pro-GAK side of the argument has almost no
> defenders! Except for David Sternlight, Dorothy Denning, and Donn Parker
> ("attack of the killer Ds"?), there are almost no public spokesmen for the
> pro-restriction, pro-GAK side.

Well, not really. Silvio Micali did some work on this topic. We also
get the lovely folks from the FBI making their public appeals (replete
with references to snuff films and other nonexistant threats), and Stu
Baker, former NSA official, does his periodic "insult the nerds"
schtick. There are others. The point is taken, though.

Perry

Hello you all!

I would like to make a suggestion that D. Denning; others
who are pro-escrow/clipper; and some of you folks here on
this forum get together for a debate. 

Ideally, this would be real nice on a TV show such as the
McNiel Lehrer show on PBS. Barring that, I would think 
that an IRC chat channel could be set up so that they
could get on line and engage in an on line discussion.

Mark

Excerpts from internet.cypherpunks: 27-Jan-96 Re: Denning's misleading
st.. by Mark Allyn 860-9454@ally 
> I would like to make a suggestion that D. Denning; others
> who are pro-escrow/clipper; and some of you folks here on
> this forum get together for a debate. 
>  
> Ideally, this would be real nice on a TV show such as the
> McNiel Lehrer show on PBS. Barring that, I would think 
> that an IRC chat channel could be set up so that they
> could get on line and engage in an on line discussion.

I doubt that they'd be interested, but if they are, Jon Lebkowsky of
EFF-Austin hosts Electronic Frontiers, a HotWired online discussion
forum, every Thursday night at 10 pm. The subject would fit in nicely
with his discussions; this week he had Steve Jackson, of Steve Jackson
Games.

I'm sure we could interest him in this.

-Declan

> Excerpts from internet.cypherpunks: 27-Jan-96 Re: Denning's misleading
> st.. by Mark Allyn 860-9454@ally 
> > I would like to make a suggestion that D. Denning; others
> > who are pro-escrow/clipper; and some of you folks here on
> > this forum get together for a debate. 
> >  
> > Ideally, this would be real nice on a TV show such as the
> > McNiel Lehrer show on PBS. Barring that, I would think 
> > that an IRC chat channel could be set up so that they
> > could get on line and engage in an on line discussion.
> 
> I doubt that they'd be interested, but if they are, Jon Lebkowsky of
> EFF-Austin hosts Electronic Frontiers, a HotWired online discussion
> forum, every Thursday night at 10 pm. The subject would fit in nicely
> with his discussions; this week he had Steve Jackson, of Steve Jackson
> Games.
> 
> I'm sure we could interest him in this.
> 
> -Declan

Definitely! I wonder who we could get from the FBI??

-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Jon Lebkowsky <jonl@well.com>                 http://www.well.com/~jonl
Host, Electronic Frontiers Forum, 7PM PST 9PM CST Thursdays
  at Club Wired <http://www.hotwired.com/club>
Vice President, EFF-Austin <http://www.io.com/~efaustin>
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Mark Allyn wrote:

| I would like to make a suggestion that D. Denning; others
| who are pro-escrow/clipper; and some of you folks here on
| this forum get together for a debate. 

	Why bother?  Denning's position is that we'll go away.  By
deploying remailers, PGP, and other pro-privacy technologies, we
change the terms of the debate, and we change the facts that they must
deal with.

	Write code, not rants.  I wrote a mixmaster installer script
recently to make installing a Mixmaster easy.  (You can get it by
sending me a message with a "Subject: get mixmaster".)  I'm working on
code to allow a Mixmaster to only send to other mixmasters, and local
users.  This would allow people to covertly run a Mixmaster, avoiding
the headache of having anonymized messages come from your site.

	Now and then, debating with Denning and the like is fun.  But
she's a statist, and I'm not.  We aren't going to see eye to eye on
this stuff, so rather than responding, with detailed arguments,
respond with code that does new & nifty stuff. A GUI version of
premail would be cool, as would a key management utility for handing
PGP keyrings and webs of trust.

Adam

-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume

(Tim May said:)

> One of the interesting things about the whole crypto debate, going back at
> least to the Clipper announcement (and actually some months before) has
> been that the pro-restrictions, pro-GAK side of the argument has almost no
> defenders! Except for David Sternlight, Dorothy Denning, and Donn Parker
> ("attack of the killer Ds"?), there are almost no public spokesmen for the
> pro-restriction, pro-GAK side.

This is interesting.

My theory is that they know they can't win a fair and open debate, so they
force us to fight straw men and try to bamboozle politicians with
ritualistic secret briefings.  The secrecy adds credibility to weak
arguments and heads off those of us who would try to point up the flaws in
them.  You can't critique what you haven't seen.

I think that one of the planks of the pro-crypto platform ought to be a 
call for the NSA to explain and defend their position publicly, and to 
engage in a dialogue on a moderated mail list.

> Tim May wrote:
> 
> I've never met Dorothy Denning, so I hesitate to characterize her as a
> villainess. But certainly she's the only noted cryptographer I know of
> who's gone so far out on a limb to defend a position the vast majority of
> computer scientists, civil libertarians, and cryptographers scoff at. (And
> I don't just mean it is we libertarians and civil libertarians who are
> scoffing, I mean that nearly every noted expert who has carefully reviewed
> the various schemes to control crypto and to provide GAK has found them to
> be essentially unenforceable except via draconian police state methods, and
> maybe not even then.)
> 
> I personally believe her estrangement from the mainstream position these
> last several years and her apparent close association with the
> inside-the-Beltway crowd has actually skewed her judgment, that she is no
> longer evaluating policies and capabilities based on reasonable objective,
> academic analysis.

Having met Dr. Denning, and watched her presentation of the Escrowed
Encryption Standard, (for the novice), I can concur with your analysis.
She presented  a very limited, safe, simple clipper chip, which  would do
nothing more than give the FBI an analogous wire tap to gather information 
on terrorists, pedophiles, and organized criminals such as drug dealers.

The limitations of her argument were quickly ripped to shreds by Phil
Zimmerman, who painted a much more expansive world view canvas for the
audience.  Denning was visibly shaking as we talked after the session.
The NSA group think she was armed with didn't provide her the tools to
deal with the reality she found herself in.

> Her views, and even many of her examples, are very close the views and
> examples used by FBI Director Louis Freeh in his testimony to Congress a
> few years ago. (I scanned and OCRed this testimony as a favor to Whit
> Diffie, so in reviewing the text for OCR corrections, I became very
> familiar with Freeh's fear-inducing testimony.)

Your participation in the A&E Voyager segment presented much food for thought.
We are becoming the "Bad Guys" in a well orchestrated Psy Ops campaign
propagated naively by the 4th Estate.  Robust cryptography and online
anonymity are portrayed as the tools of various "Boogie Men" the US Gov't
is obliged to protect  its unsuspecting civilians from.

Its up to us to find them specifically lying and cheating, and expose that
information to public scrutiny.  30 years ago the 4th Estate had a field
day hyping the LSD Chromosome Break *Hoax*.  Van Sim, of the Edgewood Arsenal
was unable to replicate the research, but his findings were suppressed by the
US Army by virtue of a long standing liaison between the CIA and the 
research and development staff at Edgewood.

Denning announced the  Clipper scheme secure, and Blaze hacked it shortly
there after.  She parrots the NSA party line, and there is a well established
link of conflict of interest negating any academic objectivity she might
profess.  Those of you who've come in personal contact with NSA cryptographers
can attest to their collective arrogance.  They consider themselves an
exclusive elite, above trivial civil liberties issues.  
-- 
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