Copyright 2000 The Times-Picayune Publishing Co.
The Times-Picayune
February 6, 2000 Sunday, ORLEANS
SECTION: MONEY; Pg. F3
LENGTH: 1422 words
HEADLINE:
E-MAIL ENCRYPTION INFILTRATES MAINSTREAM;
PRIEST TEACHES HIS FLOCK TO MASK
E-CONFESSIONS
BYLINE: By Newhouse News Service
BODY:
The Rev. William Morton, an Anglican priest
in the Canadian province of New Brunswick, has been a computer geek since
adolescence, selling Apple II's in high school, posting notes on electronic
bulletin boards long before e-mail became common, jumping on the Internet back
when it wasn't such an easy leap.
So it isn't surprising that he uses
the Internet to counsel and comfort his far-flung flock at Christ's Church of
Campbellton. Morton's parishioners may tell him their deepest, darkest secrets
in messages that are confessions in all but a church-sanctioned sense. But while
the faceless nature of e-mail engenders the most revealing communication, Morton
knows there is accompanying danger: Computer messages can last forever and, once
sent over the Internet, are easily intercepted. For that reason, he offers to
encode electronic communications and teaches how to download and use readily
available encryption software.
"They tell me things they have not had
the courage to tell anyone else face to face," said Morton, 42. "Sometimes, just
that simple act of telling someone else is enough to lift that burden."
For Morton, encoding soul-sensitive messages is a high-tech way to keep
priestly vows of trust and confidence. For the rest of the computer-using world,
encryption is just one of several ways to fend off what Morton calls the "snoopy
gray people" of cyberspace.
Experts say individuals should also get
familiar with remailers, Web proxies and anonymizers, along with programs that
cloak the Web surfer by taking advantage of how information moves across the
Internet. All are tools that reclaim a measure of protection against the very
technology that puts the world at one's fingertips.
"People know there's
a privacy issue, but they don't know there's something they can really do about
it," said Tim Kane, founder and chief executive officer of enonymous.com, a San
Diego privacy software company that rates more than 25,000 Web sites. "They're
over it. They say, 'I know that if I go on the Web, I don't have any privacy.'
That's not true."
Every online action leaves an electronic trail --
dubbed "mouse-droppings" or a "click stream" -- that can be used to compile a
marketing profile or a surveillance dossier. Every e-mail message gets chopped
up into digital "packets" that, handled and often archived by third-party
servers, can be intercepted.
Even more worrisome is sophisticated and
automated data-gathering technology that mines, compiles and reshuffles widely
dispersed information without consumers' knowledge.
Under American law,
this information is largely a corporate commodity, generally exempted from the
strictest Fourth Amendment privacy protections, even when it deals with the most
personal financial and medical matters. It is data that gets sold or traded,
usually without an individual's input or consent.
And as more and more
people use the Internet -- to shop as well as surf -- privacy becomes a prime
consumer relations problem for e-business. A recent survey by the U.S.
Department of Commerce found that 86 percent of those who contemplate online
shopping worry about giving up too much personal information.
"Privacy will be to the next century what civil rights were to
this century," said Austin Hill, co-founder and president of Zero-Knowledge
Systems, a Canadian developer of privacy software.
Hill acknowledges the
double-edged nature of the Internet's power. The trick is to protect privacy
without sacrificing the consumer-comforts of technology. "We all don't want to
become Amish, do we?" he asked.
To plug the flow of personal
information, the savvy Web surfer has three main categories of tools: encryption
software, remailers and anonymizers, also known as Web proxies.
Encryption software encodes messages and offers a set of "public" and
"private" electronic keys to unlock the masked message. One of the best-known
and most utilitarian encryption programs available is PGP (Pretty Good Privacy),
developed by Phillip Zimmermann of Palo Alto, Calif. American law enforcement
figures were so worried about terrorists using PGP that, for a time, it could
not be exported. That ban has now been relaxed.
Remailers are a series
of electronic blinds between sender and recipient that make it more difficult to
track who is sending what to whom.
Think of a set of nested Russian
dolls: Each stop in the remailing string is one of those dolls and knows where
the message came from and where it is being sent, but no more. When combined
with coded text, remailing makes snooping difficult for all but the most
sophisticated hacker or government agency. Cypherpunk and Mixmaster are the
best-known remailer technologies.
Web proxies, or anonymizers, establish
an electronic screen between individual computer users and the Web sites they
visit.
Routing requests through a service like anonymizer.com, masks an
individual's identity; all the Web site gets is the Web proxy address, not the
individual's. Some services will even "lie," filling a Web site's automated
customer information forms with bogus names and addresses so that the user can
surf the site leaving no personal information behind.
In the
not-so-distant past, you had to be a bit of a geek to use these tools. Even the
relatively simple task of programming a Web browser to reject "cookies" -- the
silent data-gathering devices that a Web site deposits directly onto hard drives
to track Internet wanderings -- was overwhelming. But new products are more user
friendly, offering a combination of automated privacy features.
There
are three avenues of solutions to the Internet privacy problem: technological
fixes, the route favored by the True Believers of the wired world;
self-regulation by companies conducting e-commerce, including rating systems and
standardized privacy codes for consumers' Web browsers; and, finally, government
regulation.
A growing body of state and federal law would extend
traditional privacy protections into cyberspace, even amid worries that
government regulation will stifle e-commerce without fixing the problem at hand.
Last year, Congress passed two bills aimed at protecting the privacy of
children and shielding them from adult-oriented material, and threatened to pass
similar protections for all citizens if self-regulation failed to work. This
year, legislatures in more than 30 states have proposed some form of Internet
privacy protection, from prohibitions against banks sharing financial
information to bans on the sale of personal information gleaned from monitoring
consumers' electronic travels.
But many observers believe the Internet,
by its very nature, defies control.
"If the Internet's broke, it's too
big for Congress or any state legislature to fix it," said John Paul Moore, a
Web designer and rural Internet access activist based in Austin, Texas. "The
technology is a moving target and moves far faster than any legislative session.
And there's no one jurisdiction that's going to be able to pass legislation that
can govern the whole Net."
Back in New Brunswick, Morton, the priest,
answers to a higher authority.
Encryption isn't just a technological
tool; it's a matter of faith. He uses a simple syllogism to illustrate his
logic: Communication that leads to healing and wholeness requires trust; trust
requires confidentiality; therefore, communication that leads to healing and
wholeness requires confidentiality.
In other words, an electronic
confession needs to be in code, for reasons of theology as well as security.
About 40 of 150 church families, many of them living in the dense
woodlands beyond the Restigouche River and its world-famous salmon run,
regularly use e-mail to communicate with him. At any given moment, he is sending
and receiving encrypted messages with four or five parishioners.
Morton
is quick to tell them that e-mail leaves "a bright, shiny trail across the
Internet" and, even when sent in code, is no substitute for face-to-face
counsel. He is a believer in the arming against the Internet's danger while
taking advantage of its power,
"The last thing we have control over is
ourselves and personal space," Morton said. "If you're going to participate in
technology, you have to open large portions of yourself to everyone.... One of
the things encryption allows is the creation of a virtual room where only two
people are taking part in the conversation. Encryption can be used to regain
that sense of privacy and the sense of control over the information."
GRAPHIC: The Rev. William Morton. Austin Hill 2 PHOTOS
LOAD-DATE: February 6, 2000 
