Essays. FSF Columns

Even more oddly, Zimmerman's program does not use the RSA algorithm exclusively, but also depends on the perfectly legal DES or Data Encryption Standard. The Data Encryption Standard, which uses a 56-bit classical key, is an official federal government cryptographic technique, created by IBM with the expert help of the NSA. It has long been surmised, though not proven, that the NSA can crack DES at will with their legendary banks of Cray supercomputers. Recently a Canadian mathematician, Michael Wiener of Bell-Northern Research, published plans for a DES decryption machine that can purportedly crack 56-bit DES in a matter of hours, through brute force methods. It seems that the US Government's official 56- bit key -- insisted upon, reportedly, by the NSA -- is now too small for serious security uses.

The NSA, and the American law enforcement community generally, are unhappy with the prospect of privately owned and powerfully secure encryption. They acknowledge the need for secure communications, but they insist on the need for police oversight, police wiretapping, and on the overwhelming importance of national security interests and governmental supremacy in the making and breaking of cyphers.

This motive recently led the Clinton Administration to propose the "Clipper Chip" or "Skipjack," a government- approved encryption device to be placed in telephones. Sets of keys for the Clipper Chip would be placed in escrow with two different government agencies, and when the FBI felt the need to listen in on an encrypted telephone conversation, the FBI would get a warrant from a judge and the keys would be handed over.

Enthusiasts for private encryption have pointed out a number of difficulties with the Clipper Chip proposal. First of all, it is extremely unlikely that criminals, foreign spies, or terrorists would be foolish enough to use an encryption technique designed by the NSA and approved by the FBI. Second, the main marketing use for encryption is not domestic American encryption, but international encryption. Serious business users of serious encryption are far more alarmed by state-supported industrial espionage overseas, than they are about the safety of phone calls made inside the United States. They want encryption for communications made overseas to people overseas -- but few foreign business people would buy an encryption technology knowing that the US Government held the exclusive keys.

It is therefore likely that the Clipper Chip could never be successfully exported by American manufacturers of telephone and computer equipment, and therefore it could not be used internationally, which is the primary market for encryption. Machines with a Clipper Chip installed would become commercial white elephants, with no one willing to use them but American cops, American spies, and Americans with nothing to hide.

A third objection is that the Skipjack algorithm has been classified "Secret" by the NSA and is not available for open public testing. Skeptics are very unwilling to settle for a bland assurance from the NSA that the chip and its software are unbreakable except with the official keys.

The resultant controversy was described by Business Week as "Spy Vs Computer Nerd." A subterranean power- struggle has broken out over the mastery of cryptographic science, and over basic ownership of the electronic bit- stream.

Much is riding on the outcome.

Will powerful, full-fledged, state-of-the-art encryption belong to individuals, including such unsavory individuals as drug traffickers, child pornographers, black-market criminal banks, tax evaders, software pirates, and the possible future successors of the Nazis?

Or will the NSA and its allies in the cryptographic status-quo somehow succeed in stopping the march of scientific progress in cryptography, and in cramming the commercial crypto-genie back into the bottle? If so, what price will be paid by society, and what damage wreaked on our traditions of free scientific and technical inquiry?

One thing seems certain: cryptography, this most obscure and smothered of mathematical sciences, is out in the open as never before in its long history. Impassioned, radicalized cryptographic enthusiasts, often known as "cypherpunks," are suing the NSA and making it their business to spread knowledge of cryptographic techniques as widely as possible, "through whatever means necessary." Small in number, they nevertheless have daring, ingenuity, and money, and they know very well how to create a public stink. In the meantime, their more conventional suit-and-tie allies in the Software Publishers Association grumble openly that the Clipper Chip is a poorly-conceived fiasco, that cryptographic software is peddled openly all over the planet, and that "the US Government is succeeding only in crippling an American industry's exporting ability."

The NSA confronted the worst that America's adversaries had to offer during the Cold War, and the NSA prevailed. Today, however, the secret masters of cryptography find themselves confronting what are perhaps the two most powerful forces in American society: the computer revolution, and the profit motive. Deeply hidden from the American public through forty years of Cold War terror, the NSA itself is for the first time, exposed to open question and harrowing reassessment.

Will the NSA quietly give up the struggle, and expire as secretly and silently as it lived its forty-year Cold War existence? Or will this most phantomlike of federal agencies decide to fight for its survival and its scientific pre-eminence?

And if this odd and always-secret agency does choose to fight the new cryptography, then -- how?

"The Dead Collider"

It certainly seemed like a grand idea at the time, the time being 1982, one of the break-the-bank years of the early Reagan Administration.

The Europeans at CERN, possessors of the world's largest particle accelerator, were pla

In raw power, this would boost the Europeans decisively past their American rivals. America's most potent accelerator in 1982, Fermilab in Illinois, could manage a meager 2 TeV. And Fermilab's Tevatron, though upgraded several times, was an aging installation.

A more sophisticated machine, ISABELLE at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, had been pla

In August 1982, Leon Lederman, then director of Fermilab, made a bold and visionary proposal. In a conference talk to high-energy physicists gathered in Colorado, Lederman proposed cancelling both ISABELLE and the latest Fermilab upgrade, in pursuit of a gigantic American particle accelerator that would utterly dwarf the best the Europeans had to offer, now or in the foreseeable future. He called it "The Machine in the Desert."

The "Desertron" (as Lederman first called it) would be the largest single scientific instrument in the world, employing a staff of more than two thousand people, plus students, teachers and various properly awestruck visiting scholars from overseas. It would be 20 times more powerful than Fermilab, and full sixty times more powerful than CERN circa 1982. The accelerator's 54 miles of deep tu