Rewriting the cryptography debate

[Matt Blaze]

So I recently re-read Lawrence Wright's controversial piece in the
New Yorker profiling Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell.
(http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/01/21/080121fa_fact_wright)
While the piece's glimpse into the administration's attitudes toward  
torture
and warrantless wiretaps have gotten much attention, I was particularly
struck by this paragraph:

      In the nineties, new encryption software that could protect  
telephone
      conversations, faxes, and e-mails from unwarranted monitoring  
was coming
      on the market, but the programs could also block entirely legal  
efforts
      to eavesdrop on criminals or potential terrorists. Under  
McConnell's
      direction, the N.S.A. developed a sophisticated device, the  
Clipper Chip,
      with a superior ability to  encrypt any electronic  
transmission; it also
      allowed law-enforcement officials, given the proper authority,  
to decipher
      and eavesdrop on the encrypted communications of others.  
Privacy advocates
      criticized the device, though, and the Clipper was abandoned by  
1996. "They
      convinced the folks on the Hill that they couldn't trust the  
government to
      do what it said it was going to do," Richard Wilhelm, who was  
in charge of
      information warfare under McConnell, says.

This seems to me a significant re-writing of history, and the Wilhelm  
quote a particularly
disingenuous interpretation of recent events.  In fact, Clipper died  
on the vine due to
technical problems that rendered it ineffective for its intended  
purpose (to say nothing
of the extravagance of being implemented in an expensive tamper- 
resistant ASIC).  And
key escrow and crypto export controls died (in 2000) not from an act  
of Congress (which
never actually voted on any cryptography legislation), but from  
unilateral action within
the executive branch.  In 2004, the Bush administration further  
liberalized the crypto
export control policies of the previous administration, which I  
believe had (and still
have) strong bipartisan support.

While Clipper certainly was a lightning rod for criticism on privacy  
grounds, the changes
in policy that eventually occurred can hardly be attributed to some  
sort of frightened
capitulation to an out-of-control privacy lobby, as the quote implies.

I blog a bit more about this at http://www.crypto.com/blog/ 
mcconnell_clipper/

-matt

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