1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

eighteen months (product cycles are, if anything, speeding up), to protect data adequately for the next twenty years the team recommended 90-bit keys.[9]

In addition, control over the export regulations and their implementation passes from the State Department to the Department of Commerce.

The Net's significance in all this may not be immediately obvious, since Clipper's first defeat didn't come from the Net but from a well-funded corporate research lab that was, as Blaze put it, "very adult" about the whole matter even though it could reasonably have expected to make a lot of money selling Clipper-based products. When it comes to government policy, successful lobbying of administrators must still come from off the Net; a box of letters still looks more impressive than a megabyte file full of email.

Privacy International director Simon Davies pointed this out at CFP'94, at a time when Net-based campaigners had collected 50,000 electronic signatures. Davies argued that 50,000 handwritten signatures collected in supermarket parking lots would have had far more meaning for members of Congress. This sort of prejudice is changing quickly. What hasn't changed as quickly is the arrogance and elitism rife on both sides of the argument--from NSA types who insist that their classified arguments would be persuasive if anyone knew what they were[10] to cypherpunks who sometimes seem to believe that the public is too stupid to understand cryptography. It's true that cryptography is an exceptionally difficult mathematical cross-discipline, but you don't have to understand the intricacies of how RSA uses 300-digit prime numbers to grasp that handing over your private key might mean that the government had access not only to today's communications session but to every transmission you have ever stored. Both sides were in for a shock. Once the Clipper debate became public, opposition was widespread and cut across some surprising boundaries. A 1994 Time/CNN poll found that 80 percent of their sample of a thousand people were against Clipper when it was explained to them.

Where the Net has made a big difference is in making available information that two decades ago would have been too hard and time- consuming for any but the most highly connected researchers to track down. It has, in other words, worked as a communications medium in precisely the way that was intended when its earliest precursor was set up: it allowed file-sharing and access to experts worldwide on an unprecedented basis. You can track the entire Clipper argument across the Net, starting with the earliest proposals for key escrow, posted to sci.crypt and other newsgroups in the summer of 1994 by Georgetown University computer science professor Dorothy Denning, another of the experts who was allowed to examine Clipper up close and personally. She has consistently argued in the face of Net fury that law enforcement needs key escrow, and her views have been received with the kind of warm Net welcome normally reserved for Laurence Canter, Martha Siegel, and that "Spamford" Wallace guy. [11]The Net was gleeful when, in July 1997, Denning published research casting doubt on her own contentions.

Everything from Denning's proposals to the current set of reports and white papers is there on the Net for examination, together with analyses from legal specialists like University of Miami associate professor A. Michael Froomkin,[12] practical cryptographers like 12Blaze and Zimmermann, and academic specialists like Britain's Ross Anderson, a professor at Cambridge University. His Web site in particular is full of important perspective for anyone inclined to assume that the government can deliver the security it's promising: you'll find papers on techniques for attacking tamper-resistant hardware and cracking RSA and DES, along with a paper on "Why Cryptosystems Fail," which should be required reading for all those seeking to set government policy in this area.[13]

Also on the Net in thorough detail is the full record of two court cases that are exerting another kind of pressure on the government to change its thinking by challenging the constitutionality of the export laws. One centers on the distinction