Bill Clinton’s snoops must love Zimmermann about as much as they enjoy static during wiretaps. Here’s a man who they fear could break the connection altogether. Many in Washington, especially FBI Director Louis Freeh, would love to see unauthorized encryption banned entirely, the real issue here. And Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa has proposed to make it a crime to distribute scrambling programs by way of international nets if the Feds lacked the electronic keys to defeat them. The Grassley measure would even ban some software now classified as exportable.
Like it or not, however, Washington no longer can control the fate of industrial-strength encryption.
Far too many Americans—and Russians, Germans, Czechs, Iranians, Singaporeans, Malaysians, Japanese, Chinese, you name it—know about the technology. The Feds instead should focus on different law enforcement techniques, and on powerful computers to unravel the bad guys’ codes. But the Clinton people and their allies won’t budge. They keep dreaming of the mass use of D.C.-blessed hardware and software to let law enforcement people listen in on supposedly confidential phone calls. Just like the old Soviet KGB, the Feds think that bureaucracy can prevail over technology, and that government has a God-given right to force citizens to be snoop-friendly.
The saga of Phil Zimmermann is hardly the only indication that some Big Brotherism is alive and well in the United States—especially when one considers other outrages, such as the recent net.censorship jihad or the elitist copyright proposals that would crimp public debate.
In all fairness, the United States is less backwards on encryption matters than are countries such as France, which bans powerful cryptography for private use.[[6.3]] And certainly Bill Clinton isn’t a dictator. In fact, the trouble with him, at least at the personal level, is the opposite: He is too much of a wimp to resist civil liberties threats from the FBI, the National Security Agency, other bureaucracies, and the more maniacal of the “law-and-order” crowd on the Hill.
Whatever Clinton’s problem, though, his encryption policy is making him reviled among many skeptical young people in Generation Net, not to mention the baby boomers, who suffered lie after lie from LBJ and Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War. A lifelong Democrat, I voted for Clinton. I might not again. His constitutional lapses, or at least those of his bureaucrats, just might help pave the way for true Orwellian scenarios in the United States and elsewhere.
So might the shameful war that a powerful Clinton appointee has waged against public libraries, one of society’s best defenses against Orwellian Ministries of Truth.
“Making Sure Orwell Was Wrong,” then, is an apt sub-title for this chapter. You’ll remember the basics of the novel 1984—bureaucrats tinkered with back issues of the London Times to suit the policies of the moment, brainwashed the proles of Oceania, and spied on most everyone with TV cameras. All had to obey the mythical Big Brother. The most vivid image from 1984 was a boot smashing again and again into a man’s face. In the era of mainframe computers bigger than overgrown Cadillacs, many critics of the Vietnam War invoked Orwell and similar pessimists. Wouldn’t pasty-faced drones in windowless rooms use the technology to keep dossiers on us?
Then microcomputers popped up. Suddenly good people could use bits and bytes to fight back against Big Brother. Amnesty International, for example, could keep databases documenting murder, torture, and other crimes by dictators. And then, via the Internet and other networks, Amnesty could spread the news around and marshal world opinion against the thugs. Other human rights groups and environmental organizations benefited, too, and soon most everyone agreed about high tech: George Orwell had been wrong. Progressives with unpopular ideas celebrated the new tools available to them. And conservatives didn’t disagree that Big Brother was dead; if microcomputers could nurture freedom and diversity, why worry so much about antitrust laws and other regulations? A New York think-tanker would eventually write a reverse 1984 in which hackers won over Big Brother.[[6.4]]
Meanwhile, an open government movement was growing on the Internet, along with efforts to use networks as an efficient conduit for services. Far from being Big Brotherish in all ways, Clinton’s people commendably put a wealth of official documents on the Net, everything from White House speeches to reports from the Agriculture Department. The states, too, acted. Californians could track down a complete set of laws and proposed laws on the Internet. North Carolinians could hook into an electronic job bank, indicate their desired kind of work, click on a map to designate a favored location, and watch jobs pop up. Oregonians could get fishing-and hunting-license information online.