[2001-09-16]
On Terrorism, Cryptography and Freedom in the aftermath of WTC
"They that would give up essential liberty
for temporary safety
deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin
I'm writing this a few days after that second day that will live in infamy; the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the United States of America. I'm writing this because I have an important word to spread, now more than ever.
I'm for freedom, and I think you are too. Freedom is to live in an open society where your right to speech and anonymity is protected. Freedom is the right to hold a dissenting view, voice unpopular opinions, and not be punished because of it.
Even before this tragic incident, the world was moving toward more draconian times. Rights which had been granted you were already being reworded, reworked and revoked. This happens in the "digital age", and the reasons are ignorance and greed. The ignorant lawmakers are being influenced by powerful, very greedy, entities which see this new era as an opportunity. Not an opportunity to build something new, or invent new cool ways of doing business. No, they see this as an opportunity to get special, for them favorable, laws implemented.
They hold that the digital era and the Internet requires new laws. This, for the most case, is not true, but using the ignorance of the lawmakers and the public, they can push fast and hard to claim large stakes of this new territory, stakes they really do not deserve or have a right to.
After hearing about the the incident, I soon found myself thinking about the implications of what had just happened. I wasn't thinking about the dead. Nothing can be done for them, they're gone -- no amount of prayer or wishful thinking can get them back. If I think too hard about it, picture it too vividly, I'll anguish in the senselessness of it all, and begin to cry.
No. My mind wandered from away from the horrors and the dead, and instead to the living. I could almost feel The Big State-Machine shifting, accelerating, sliding. There's a slope here, and I wish very much that we could not slide down it.
The enemy from without will rouse the enemy from within, and then they'll both win.
It began ever so innocently. Laws were implemented saying we do not have the right to disassemble, decompile or reverse-engineer the code of commercial software. Somehow taking a product and analyzing its parts isn't allowed in the new era. Whereas I can buy a car and dismantle it in my back-yard and none would think it the least bit odd -- well, they would if they actually knew me, but you get my point -- somehow doing the exact same thing in this new digital era is not allowed. But why would you care? You have no interest in dismantling your car, much less in dismantling software, right?
The next step is to make it illegal not only to actually dismantle a program, but to talk about dismantling it. After all, if dismantling it is illegal, couldn't talking about how it can be done sort of be seen as advocating and teaching how to break the law? But you don't care about that either, because you really couldn't care less about people talking about how to reverse-engineer software. To make it less apparent that they're about to remove a whole class of rights, they'll shroud the law in terms of "bypassing content protection" or some such. Of course, there'll be no real definition of what constitutes such a protection, but rest assured that they'll know it when they see it.
Then your hear on the news about a new model car which have a tendency to topple over. You decide not to buy it. You did buy a new word processor software though. Unfortunately it will secretly mark everything you produce with your name and address and a universally unique id. When you save a document encrypted, it'll actually store it twice in the same file, once with your password, and once again with a password chosen by party unknown.
Had you known this, you probably wouldn't have bought it either, but figuring this out would be illegal, and telling you how you could check for yourself would be illegal too. So you live in ignorance. Maybe a year or so later you'll reflect on how a competitor to your company, on the other side of the pond, is always able to underbid you by just so much. You begin to wonder if maybe they've bought someone on you staff. Or maybe it's just pure luck. Maybe.
On the nine'o'clock news you hear about a country on the other side of the world, where three dissidents were just executed after having been found in possesion of material critical of the government and god. You wonder why they didn't encrypt their material, your own word-processor does that effortlessly.
I fear that we're heading for a world where basic freedoms; the right to disassemble, the right to encrypt, the right to be anonymous, the right to dissent, will disappear. "Protect the people against terrorism" will become the new "Protect our children". It will trump everything. Justify anything.
And then we'll all be criminals. At the very least, we'll be criminals until we've proven otherwise.
And the people will allow it, because they have been manipulated into hate and rage, a state where you're hard pressed to stop and think. The people will allow it because they've only heard the One True View, that it's necessary in order to catch terrorists.
Software will not use strong cryptography, because if it did terrorist could hide from the police and intelligence agencies, and that would be very bad. Understand, they wouldn't remove your right to privacy and anonymity unless it was very important, important as in "Protecting you from terrorism". It's such a small price to pay, wouldn't you say?
The terrorists used personal computer flight simulators to train flying? Well then, maybe we'll just have to make flight simulators a munition. Small price to pay. Maybe we'll have to ban owning flight-manuals too. Books been banned before.
Of course, all terrorists obey the law; they'll stay away from flight-simulators, because it would be illegal for them to run one, and they'll will happily forfeit the use of strong cryptography, a technology which is already out there, readily available.
Of course they will not! That is why strong cryptography must be illegal. Using it, knowing about it, talking about it. That way law-enforcement will make everyone who use it a criminal, and criminals have no rights. When you use strong cryptography you'll be a criminal until you prove that you are not, which you do by handing over the keys. Refuse and you'll go to jail, or worse.
Remember when it was innocent until proven guilty? No more. Your children will know that only as an amusing anecdote from times past.
The EU recently released a critical report of the ECHELON network. It called for implementing protection through the use of strong, open cryptography. One can only wonder what will happen with that effort now that there is a new card to play in the propaganda, a card which says ECHELON is the essential tool in catching terrorists. Could it be that the protection called for will only be granted the chosen few?
You might be thinking, "What do I care about strong cryptography? I don't have anything to hide.", but then know this; Encrypting a message so that only a recipient chosen by you can read it is analogous to you meeting that person to talk in private, with no one else listening in. You encrypting a file so that only you can read it, is analogous to having a thought. It's your thought. You don't have to share it, you don't have to tell it to anyone; it's your private message to yourself. You might not use this channel of communication today, but these rights to privacy, are they really something you would want to give up, anywhere, for any reason?
And so the circle closed. The terrorists set out to change our democratic society through terror and violence, but we told them that they couldn't win. We wouldn't allow it.
But then the hunt began; blood called for blood and sacrifices had to be made. In a frantic effort to get to the few, millions had to sacrifice their freedom. Strong cryptography and anonymity could hide terrorists, and so it had to go.
And so it were, that the terrorists won.
Land of the free? You tell me.
Signed,
Eddy L O Jansson.
©2001 Eddy L O Jansson. All rights reserved. All trademarks acknowledged.