Posted on 08/29/2002 6:42:05 PM PDT by Tumbleweed_Connection
Al Gore once assured the American public that an Orwellian government would not monitor us. Even today, Al Gore will not claim that he planned to enable the government to tap every phone in the United States if it so desired.
Al Gore wanted to be Big Brother. In 1993, Vice President Al Gore spearheaded a project called "Clipper" which was designed to monitor America. Gore's leadership in this scheme to allow the Feds to have easy access to bug American telephones is all too well documented for him to deny.
"We also want to assure users of key escrow encryption products that they will not be subject to unauthorized electronic surveillance," wrote Al Gore in a 1994 memo to Congress.
"As we have done with the Clipper Chip, future key escrow schemes must contain safeguards to provide for key disclosures only under legal authorization and should have audit procedures to ensure the integrity of the system," wrote Gore.
WEBSTER HUBBELL AND A SECRET PROJECT
One document released by the Justice Dept. is a March 1993 Justice Dept. memo from Stephen Colgate, Assistant Attorney General for Administration, to Webster Hubbell.
In 1993, Webster Hubbell, the now convicted Rose office law partner of Hillary Clinton, served as the number two at the Justice Department. Both Gore and Janet Reno personally tasked Hubbell to run the Clipper project.
Colgate's 1993 memo to Hubbell provides the details of the Gore plan. According to the Colgate memo, Vice President Al Gore chaired a meeting with Hubbell, Reno, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, and Leon Panetta in March 1993. The meeting was on the "AT&T Telephone Security Device".
In 1992, AT&T had developed secure telephones that the U.S. government could not tap. In response, AT&T was secretly paid by the Clinton administration to keep the secure phones out of the American market. According to Colgate's memo, the secure phones were simply too dangerous for American citizens.
"AT&T has developed a Data Encryption Standard (DES) product for use on telephones to provide security for sensitive conversations. The FBI, NSA and NSC want to purchase the first production run of these devices to prevent their proliferation. They are difficult to decipher and are a deterrent to wiretaps," Assistant Attorney General Colgate wrote to Webster Hubbell.
SECRET FUND
The basic idea of the plan was to pay money to AT&T into using a National Security Agency (NSA) developed chip called CLIPPER inside its phones and computers. The Clipper chip would enable the Federal government to monitor both secure computer and telephone conversations.
Hubbell arranged for the entire production run of secure AT&T phones to be secretly purchased, using the Department of Justice "confiscation" fund supplied by the "drug war", in order to keep the purchase off the general books.
The project also included plans to "mandate" the Clipper chip into all U.S. homes and businesses. According to a secret March 1993 memo to Webster Hubbell, "FBI, NSA and NSC want to push legislation which would require all government agencies and eventually everyone in the U.S. to use a new public-key based cryptography method."
MANDATING THE GOVERNMENT SOLUTION
The plan to have access to every American's phones was justified in a SECRET memo to Webster Hubbell by the National Security Agency. According to Stewart Baker, NSA General Counsel, the super-secret agency "considered seeking legislation to give the government authority to regulate the manufacture or importation of encryption into the United States."
"But regulation or forbidding encryption would be a big step - and a controversial one. It seems prudent to try the less drastic voluntary approach first," noted NSA's Baker in his memo to Hubbell.
"It is also possible that competitors will not use CLIPPER and will tout their devices' lack of law enforcement access. If so, the government will have to face the harder question of whether to make key escrow mandatory," noted Baker in the SECRET memo.
"But that is a question the government would have to face today if AT&T introduced a successful non-key-escrow device. In addition to delaying the problem, getting AT&T to use CLIPPER voluntarily will give decision makers the advantage of real-life experience with key-escrow, which will provide a much better basis for deciding whether mandatory key-escrow is practicable."
Despite public statements to the contrary, and payouts to AT&T, the Clinton administration determined that mandatory CLIPPER chips were the only answer. According to a 1993 FBI memo to then Clinton national security advisor George Tenet, "technical solutions, such as they are, will only work if they are incorporated into all encryption products. To ensure that this occurs, legislation mandating the use of Government approved encryption products or adherence to Government encryption criteria is required."
ACHILLES HEELS
However, according to secret FBI documents, the Clipper chip also had an "exploitable" feature. That "exploitable feature" was an Achilles heel. In 1993, Benita Cooper, NASA Associate Administrator for Management Systems and Facilities, documented the fatal flaw in Gore's great computer-security idea. "The (Clipper) Chip programmer is a device provided by the National Security Agency. There is no assurance, without scrutiny, that all keying material introduced during the chip programming is not already available to the NSA. Thus, not only do the escrow key agents have a decryption capability, the NSA also retains this capability," wrote Ms. Cooper in her rejection of the Clipper chip for NASA.
"Compromise of the NSA keys, such as in the Walker case, could compromise the entire EES (Escrowed Encryption Standard) system," concluded Ms. Cooper. Despite the public assurances by Al Gore that the Clipper project would require legal authority to monitor subjects, it was clear at the technical level that the chip did not require any authority other than a secret okay from the NSA.
CONVICTED CRIMINALS AND TOP SECRETS
The secret Clipper project also had another flaw. A corrupt individual led it. In April of 1994, Hubbell resigned from the Justice Department under allegations of fraud. Even though Hubbell was gone, the access-to-your-computer idea did not die. According to the 1996 report to V.P. Gore by then CIA Director Deutch, Ms. Reno proposed an all out Federal take-over of the computer security industry.
The Justice Department, proposed "legislation that would ... ban the import and domestic manufacture, sale or distribution of encryption that does not have key recovery. Janet Reno and Louis Freeh are deeply concerned about the spread of encryption. Pervasive use of encryption destroys the effectiveness of wiretapping, which supplies much of the evidence used by FBI and Justice. They support tight controls, for domestic use."
If Al Gore had become President, it is certain that the mandatory government phone and computer bug legislation would have become reality along with another term for Louis Freeh as FBI director.
As it is, the follow-on to Clipper authorized by the Freeh led FBI is called Carnivore. Carnivore is simply a system to monitor the keystrokes on a target computer, and it is similar in construction to many virus programs that circulate on the Internet. The Carnivore system is so imperfect that it gathers unneeded, and sometimes, unwarranted information that must be screened out.
According to Colgate's memo, the secure phones were simply too dangerous for American citizens.If American citizens could have used them, so could Al Qaeda terrorists. Do we want to give up the ability to wiretap well-funded criminal and terror groups when necessary?
I'm struggling to see how this can be classified as 'news'...
How do you define "our government"?
An excellent analogy that you might find interesting is located at: www.geektimes.com/michael/culture/humor/items/Privacy-related/TransparentTreesAnalogy.html
I was thinking in terms of the Federal government, for the most part. Next the various State governments. The governments that have been permitted to ignore Constitutional limits for far too long. And, regarding the Federal government, that government that has been permitted to ignore its primary Constitutionally mandated responsibilities for far too long.
...I've mutated into a full fledged, tin hat, conspiracy theorist...
I am certain that a similar argument was used to justify the Quartering Act, in which British soldiers were housed in colonist's homes, to cut down on 'illegal' smuggling of tea and other products that did not bear a stamp that the tax was paid.
I take it then that you do not approve of wiretaps at all. If you really care strongly about it, it would be possible to get a law passed banning them.
American citizens have many encryption options available, as do the terrorists. Despite which fact, the government can decode those messages if they have a warrant and really, really want to find out what is being communicated.
Tortured analogies aside, do you think the government should give up all wiretaps as a tool of law enforcement?
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