Quite properly, then, most citizens did not trust Washington. Hackers wore sweatshirts that played on a slogan that Intel used to promote computers using its chips. Alluding to Clipper, the sweatshirts read, “Big Brother Inside.” Tens of thousands of people on the Net lent their names to an anti-Clipper petition originated by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. John Perry Barlow, the Grateful Dead lyricist who cofounded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told how snoopy Feds would have to kill him and pry his private PGP key from his “cold, dead fingers.” Through it all, meg after meg of messages went out over the Net—everything from sophomoric diatribes to carefully reasoned pleas for anti-Clipper letters to local members of Congress.
After questioning some arguments against Clipper, one man found himself vilified all over the Net, complete with a lie that he had made a homosexual advance against a hacker. The privacy movement was supposed to defend Americans’ right to dissent, not enforce its own form of alternative orthodoxy. I felt grumpy, then, about the smear. But that was a relatively rare incident; typical opposition to Clipper was passionate but high minded.
Except for the smear described above, the meanest statements came not from Clipper foes but from Stewart A. Baker, a PGP critic who was about to return to private practice after serving as chief counsel for the National Security Agency. Wired commendably let Baker give his side. The magazine did so “with all the enthusiasm,” Baker wrote, “of Baptist ministers turning their Sunday pulpits over to the Devil.”
Understandably Baker began by denying that Clipper would “create a brave new world of government intrusion into the privacy of Americans.” Baker said that key escrow would merely maintain Washington’s rights to do wire-taps as presently authorized. That was a wrong; the government actually was going out of its way to make us all tap ready, as if we were back in the old Soviet Union in the KGB era. But at least in this case Baker wasn’t maligning the Net. The nastiness oozed out later when his article took on “Myth Number Two: Unreadable encryption is the key to our future liberty.” Baker shrugged off such reasoning as “the long-delayed revenge of people who couldn’t go to Woodstock because they had too much trig homework. It reflects a wide—and kind of endearing—streak of romantic high-tech anarchism that crops up throughout the computer world.” Then he let loose against PGP-style programs itself. “Some argue that widespread availability of this encryption will help Latvian freedom fighters today and American freedom fighters tomorrow.” Presumably thousands of PGP boosters were hunkered down making bombs in Manhattan basements.
Having tried to ignore the legitimate uses of PGP by thousands of peaceful, law-abiding citizens, Baker then told how “a high-tech pedophile in Santa Clara, California, had a PGP-encrypted diary of his contacts with susceptible young boys using computer bulletin boards all over the country.” Oh. So between overthrowing the government, PGP users would be seducing eight-year-olds. Baker huffed that “if unescrowed encryption becomes ubiquitous, there will be many more stories like this.”
Poor Baker. If he’d really wanted to do his attacks right, he could have quoted with full grimness the writings that Timothy May, the Cypherpunk, had posted on the Net in the spirit of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman.
May was the author of a long, detailed, sometimes even Talmudic list of frequently asked questions and answers on cryptography and the fight for privacy, which might or might not have been on the Net at the time Baker was writing his Wired piece. But if not, he could have found equivalent thoughts among May’s many postings to the Cypherpunks’[Cypherpunks’] rather public list. Laying out the case against strong encryption programs in the PGP vein, May conjectured that they could make killing for hire much more practical. People using encryption could rely on trusted agents who dispensed anonymous digital cash. “There are some ways to reduce the popularity of this Murder Incorporated system,” May said, and kindly assured readers that he had been thinking about them.
For good measure May noted that racists such as the Aryan Nation were using encryption, and “other kinds of terrorists” might be relying on it as well. “Expect more uses in the future, as things like PGP continue to spread.” As if that weren’t enough to pull bureaucrats’ chains, May said: “Many of us are explicitly anti-democratic and hope to use encryption to undermine the so-called democratic governments of the world.”
May, ever the idea juggler, also weighed in with some powerful arguments for PGP that appealed strongly to a stodgy old Democrat (small “d” as well) like me. Even the Feds should have grasped them. “Could strong crypto be used for sick and disgusting and dangerous purposes?” May asked. And then he answered himself: “So can locked doors, but we don’t insist on an ‘open door policy’ (outside of certain quaint sorority and rooming houses!). So do many forms of privacy allow plotters, molesters, racists, etc., to meet and plot.” Whatever May was, anarchist, libertarian, objectivist, or nothing, he was making more sense in those three sentences than Baker could have in a 1,000 essays.
After May signed up for Cyberia, a legally oriented list, he was one of the favorite nonlawyers there, winning friends even among those who disagreed with his politics. In one limited way he may have been more threatening to Washington than Hoffman or Rubin, for, rather than just ranting and raving and putting on a good show, he could communicate all too cogently with members of the establishment. At the same time the Feds were fixating on Zimmermann, May casually told the lawyers how he moved in and out of the country without letting Washington veto his speeches on encryption. In effect his gleeful confession made mockery of the laws. If D.C. couldn’t even control a traveler—there in flesh and blood—how could it monitor electrons speeding over the phone wires?