Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
power is not trusted to any chosen individual (read “trustee”) but to a
multiplicity of delegated individuals.” 37 Micali's patents were eventually
bought by the U.S. government and the concept of “fairness” has enjoyed
a respectable career as a design feature of various cryptographic protocols—
for example, anonymous electronic cash whose traceability can neverthe-
less be switched back on to meet the needs of law enforcement.
Perhaps the most surprising compromise was offered by none other
than Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau. In Privacy on the Line , a review of
the crypto policy debates, they provided extensive arguments that any
attempt to regulate the spread of encryption technologies was at best
futile, and at worst antidemocratic. Yet the authors suggested to the int-
elligence community that the ensuing loss of wiretapping capabilities
might be offset by an unexpected consolation:
Tactical communications intelligence will probably improve despite the prevalence
of encryption. Cryptography is much less successful at concealing patterns of
communication than at concealing the contents of messages. In many environ-
ments, addresses (and, equally important, precedences) must be left in clear so that
routers will know how packets are to be forwarded. In most environments, the
lengths and timings of messages are difficult to conceal. SIGINT organizations are
already adept at extracting intelligence from traffic patterns and will adapt to extract
more. The resulting intelligence product, abetted by increases in computer power,
may not give as detailed a picture in some places but will give a more comprehensive
overview. 38
In other words, although individual communications might become
untappable, communication patterns will fill in the missing intelligence
glue. Even better, this new form of intelligence will increase in quality, as
social intercourse increasingly takes place over computer networks, provid-
ing intelligence agencies endless opportunities for traffic analysis and elec-
tronic profiling.
Similarly, law enforcement would find its losses greatly mitigated by the
enhanced opportunities for low-level social control offered by information
technologies. Diffie and Landau pointed out that “the police are a mecha-
nism of social control, and their work goes hand in hand with other
mechanisms of social control. . . . Employees in many jobs are now moni-
tored by machines. Workers who once had substantial autonomy, such as
truck drivers, find that they are subject to the same sort of close monitor-
ing that might have been expected on a factory floor.”39 39 Thus, fears that
the spread of strong cryptography would wreak havoc on intelligence
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