Copyright 1999 The Chronicle Publishing Co.
The San
Francisco Chronicle
SEPTEMBER 8, 1999, WEDNESDAY, FINAL EDITION
SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A25; OPEN FORUM
LENGTH: 645 words
HEADLINE:
Privacy Concerns Grow Along With Electronic Communication
BYLINE: Alexander Tabarrok
BODY:
IT SEEMS THAT everyone is using the Internet
to become more efficient, even Congress. In July, for the first time ever,
Congress sent a bill to the president via the Internet. For security, the
legislators encrypted the bill using PGP (Pretty Good Privacy software). PGP is
the sort of software which, if you tried to distribute it on the Internet, can
get you thrown into a jail as an international arms merchant. The CIA, the NSA,
the Commerce Department and other agencies have fought in court to prevent the
American public from having access to it and similar advanced encryption
techniques. Apparently, it's one set of rules for the government and another for
mere citizens.
If the Clinton administration continues to treat
encryption techniques like arms, then perhaps we ought to remind them of the
Second Amendment. The founding fathers guaranteed the right to keep and bear
arms so that the people would have a safeguard against tyranny. Encryption
techniques are a similar bulwark protecting liberty. The Berlin Wall would never
have stood for so long if the East German Stasi had not been able to monitor the
telephone conversations and open the mail of every East German citizen. Unlike
former East Germans, U.S. citizens need not be paranoid about the potential
abuse of government power, but it would be foolish to ignore the fact that the
FBI has bugged peaceful civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, as well as
members of Congress and the Supreme Court.
Nor is government monitoring
of phone calls a thing of the past. If you have ever made a phone call to anyone
outside of the United States, your phone call -- or fax, or e-mail or other data
transmission -- was probably recorded by the National Security Agency. The name
of any U.S. citizen is supposed to be erased whenever a human analyzes captured
recordings. But the Echelon surveillance network is run jointly by U.S.,
British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand spy agencies and no law prevents
intelligence agencies of other bcountries from spying on U.S. citizens.
According to Mike Frost, a former employee of Canada's NSA counterpart, the NSA
and other agencies get around laws against spying on their own citizens by
asking their international counterparts to do it for them.
Everyone who
has used the Internet to buy books, music or computer supplies appreciates the
necessity of encrypting financial information like credit-card numbers. It's not
just financial information that needs encrypting; privacy is
important when researching and transmitting medical information
or when sending letters to a lover. Would you leave your love letters lying open
for public view?
Businesses, too, are using the Internet to speed
communication of ideas and documents among corporate divisions and need to keep
this information confidential.
Fortunately, the courts have been more
respective of individual rights than Congress and the Clinton administration.
The U.S. Appeals Court for the Ninth Circuit recently struck down Clinton's
executive order prohibiting publication of encryption techniques on the
Internet. The administration, however, is almost certain to appeal, and Congress
isn't giving up either. Two years ago, Congressman Porter Goss, R-Fla., tried to
make it a crime to distribute PGP and other encryption software, such as that
built into Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. With the failure of that
plan, he now wants to bribe software developers to help the government pry into
our private lives. Goss is promoting legislation that will give encryption
software developers a 15 percent tax break if they give the government a key to
open any "secure" files.
Goss' bill is unlikely to pass, but it's a good
indication of how eager the government is to listen in on our private
conversations and how careful we must be to not let this happen.
LOAD-DATE: September 8, 1999
