Soon, however, two subpoenas suggested that Washington was still quite eager to justify any and all of the Cypherpunk’s paranoia.
One subpoena went to Austin Code Works, which sold public-domain software that contained some of Zimmermann’s work. Washington struck out. It had been seeking evidence of overseas sales, and Austin lacked any in this case. Zimmermann hadn’t even sold Austin his work directly.[[6.21]]
Washington was more lucky at ViaCrypt, a company in Arizona, where the subpoena stuck. Zimmermann had just given ViaCrypt a PGP license. Now he indeed would be under investigation. In PGP: Pretty Good Privacy, Simson Garfinkel observed that RSA Data did not win similar honors even though it had placed encryption-related software on the Internet. Nor did Internet providers such as Netcom, which stored PGP on computers that people overseas could reach.[[6.22]] Bill Clinton’s people were letting foreigners dial up this export-controlled software again and again. Needless to say, the bullying of Zimmermann still made the industry nervous—who was next?
As if the Clinton White House hadn’t sinned enough, it was about to embarrass itself in a high-tech version of the Bay of Pigs. That’s how critics regarded a nitwit scheme to control encryption and discourage the public from using good software such as PGP. The Bay of Pigs, a cuckoo plan for the invasion for Cuba, was a legacy that had come to John F. Kennedy from the Eisenhower Administration. The odds would have delighted no one but a masochistic squad of kamikaze pilots. Castro crushed a small band of Cuban exiles who showed up on Washington’s behalf at the Bay of Pigs. Like the debacle on the Cuban beaches, the Clipper chip was really another Republican leftover. The national security apparatus hadn’t been able to con the Bush Administration into implementing Clipper before the election. But Bill Clinton himself lacked the guts to resist the NSA.
“No Such Agency,” as Washington wags called it, operated out of Fort Meade, Maryland, near the Chesapeake Bay, perhaps explaining its fondness for assigning nautical names to encryption plans. Many billions of tax money had gone into the NSA over the years. Thousands worked for it. And they weren’t just interested in the survival of the United States. They wanted job security. Clipper was going to be a meal ticket. Just as some wishful planners had deluded themselves into thinking that a small band of men could tame Cuba, now the NSA was telling Bill Clinton’s people that it could use Clipper to control the world of encryption.
All those irksome constitutional details aside, the NSA’s plan might actually have made sense once. The people at Fort Meade had done the United States a service by staying ahead of Soviet encryption in the era of tail fins and air raid drills. But today such an approach was about as appropriate as a backyard bomb shelter. As far back as the 1970s, two men outside NSA’s control had invented public key encryption, which, as noted before, was a good way for strangers to exchange secure messages and authenticate their identities[identities] from the start. Whitfield Diffie was a mathematician, computer scientist, and encryption expert. Martin Hellman was an electronic engineer. Both were grouchy about a computer system whose users had to entrust their passwords to the systems managers. So they came up with public key encryption—the same principle that was behind the RSA approach used in PGP, and now available from Boston to Brisbane.
Even Bill Clinton couldn’t repeal the past. Just as the Kennedy Administration had justified Castro’s paranoia, so the Clinton Administration worked hard to do the same with that of the Cypherpunks. This time Washington wouldn’t deploy humans. Instead it wanted to rely on a little computer chip that Steven Levy described as “just another tiny square of plastic covering a silicon thicket.”
“Tumor-sized” might have been more apropos. Clipper, in fact, was a tumor of sorts.
In a human body a tumor serves itself, not its host. And that’s what Clipper was supposed to do. The Clinton Administration wanted to license Clipper to the private sector, where it would show up in millions of telephones and dominate the market—displacing future encryption schemes based on technologies such as PGP. Washington hoped to make Clipper too cheap to resist and to provide a federal market for Clipper products. AT&T and the rest could put Clipper in telephones, and then, supposedly, dope peddlers couldn’t peddle and terrorists couldn’t terrorize without the Feds having a chance to intercept their conversations. The government would also work to make computers snoop friendly.
That was the scenario. Like tumors these government-issue chips were to spread—not only in the States but also overseas. Eventually the Feds would also announce plans to make Clipper available through software, rather than just through the chip. Whatever the incarnation of Clipper, though, Washington would play down the fact that it would corrode the country’s constitutional right to privacy. America’s Winston Smiths would have to trust a government that had covered up an unhealthy number of deaths from nuclear fallout, given us Watergate, and illegally spied on thousands of Americans.