“I myself just presented a paper on ‘Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities’ in Monte Carlo,” May told the cyberlawyers, at least one of whom was an attorney from the Justice Department. “I described algorithms, methods, etc., and was never asked or instructed to submit to the Men in Black in D.C.” He was even carrying around “several gigabytes of code, essays, programs.” But never was he “ever stopped, questioned, or searched. Only upon landing in San Francisco was I asked to state my business overseas. I said I was meeting with cryptographers from around the world! This was met with confusion by the twenty-two-year-old Customs officer; but after asking if any of them were from Russia or Iraq, and I told him I had no idea if there were or not, he waved me through.” May said most U.S. cryptographers “just shrug and ignore the possibility that our papers may be illegal to present outside the U.S.”
His observations came as the Electronic Frontier Foundation was trying to resolve matters in a more tidy way. It was sponsoring a lawsuit to prevent Washington from restricting the spread of encryption-related writing and software. Quite correctly the EFF argued that the encryption laws were an “impermissible prior restraint on speech, in violation of the First Amendment.” An EFF victory, needless to say, could nuke the government’s case against Zimmermann.
With Hooverian tenacity, as if Phil Zimmermann were Dillinger or a godfather, Washington kept up its harassment and even escalated it in some ways. Jim Warren saw this happen firsthand. He had asked to testify several years ago in Zimmermann’s defense, but the authorities ignored his request. Then in 1995 he had published op-ed pieces in San Jose and San Francisco papers, in which he throttled the FBI and NSA for getting in the way of the best possible security on the Net. In the wake of the Mitnick break-ins, he had accused the Feds of “endangering millions of innocent citizens and law-abiding[law-abiding] businesses that use the Net or cell phones, in order to protect their ability to monitor the few who might be guilty of something.” Almost immediately two U.S. Customs agents favored Warren with a surprise visit to his house and quizzed him about Zimmermann and PGP. “When they began the interview,” he said, “they handed me a subpoena that said I was ‘COMMANDED to appear and testify before the Grand Jury of the United States District Court’ in San Jose.“[[6.23]]
“Who says government isn’t responsive,” Warren quipped.
He said this in a folksy newsletter sent to hundreds of people on the Net. Its well-earned name was Government Access; he had been the main organizer of a successful campaign to get California to put legislative information on the Internet for free. As much as anyone he was trying to work within The System. Yet he was ever skeptical toward “Congress Critters.” Again and again Warren’s newsletter in effect depicted a Washington that could be Torylike in its contempt toward Netfolk.
Warren didn’t just write of the well-publicized threats like the Exon bill, or the Clinton Administration’s prosecution of a couple in California because their sex-oriented BBS did not come up to Bible Belt community standards in Tennessee, or the Zimmermann case itself. Warren also wrote of obscure people such as a Berkeley-area hacker who, enraged by restrictions on encryption and by other actions in the vein of King George’s Stamp Act, had fled to Sweden.
“Sweden is no paradise,” the expatriate told Warren via e-mail, “but I don’t ever worry that the government is going to break into my home. I know that I’ll be able to run my BBS, maintain all the contacts I’ve developed over the years, and continue to use the various nets without fear of Uncle Sam attacking me. So now I’m trading in my U.S. passport for one that is a lot less threatening to me and my PC.” Warren added: “This is the second former American I have known who has done this for exactly these reasons!” I remembered a hacker libertarian who had been hoping to construct an island in the Caribbean, beyond the reach of technophobic politicians.
Warren was disappointed enough with Washington to tell the Net: “I’m beginning to feel like a German Jew in 1935.” He didn’t just hate Clipper and the harassment of Zimmermann. On top of everything else, Washington had recently passed a digital telephone bill that “would make Lyndon Johnson, Nixon’s Watergate team, and J. Edgar Hoover drool on their bibs.” The project would cost the taxpayers billions of dollars over the years—all this to make the phone system more tappable, out of fear that crooks might otherwise forward phone calls to bugfree locations. Washington was actually setting aside more money for snooping than for electronic libraries. And now Warren feared that the Feds someday would ban encryption outright.
Beyond D.C.’s computer-related stupidities, he loathed the way the Feds played fast and easy with the Constitution on matters such as drug law enforcement. Agencies, for example, could keep money and equipment taken from suspects and use them for their own purposes, thus giving police “a profit motive” to abuse Americans’ rights.
“No doubt,” Warren said, “many in Germany told that nation’s Jews, ‘It’s not that serious’ and ‘It’s just a phase—it’ll pass’ as they disarmed the citizens in the name of law and order only a few years before filling the camps and ovens that somehow good, law-abiding Germans just never knew about until after the war. If we don’t watch out, our government’s cure for ‘crime’ will become even more dangerous than the illness. And this time, I don’t think Sweden will be a safe haven.”