The Code Book
Just finished reading The Code Book
Some favorite select quotes:
Phil Zimmermann, author of PGP:
Cryptography used to be an obscure science, of little relevance to everyday life. Historically, it always had a special role in the military and diplomatic communications. But in the Information Age, cryptography is about political power and in particular, about the power relationship between a government and its people. It is about the right to privacy, freedom of speech, freedom of political association, freedom of the press, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, freedom to be left alone.
In the past, if the government wanted to violate the privacy of ordinary citizens, it had to expend a certain amount of effort to intercept and steam open and read paper mail, or listen to and possibly transcribe spoken telephone conversations. This is analogous to catching fish with a hook and a line, one fish at a time. Fortunately for freedom and democracy, this kind of labour-intensive monitoring is not practical on a large scale. Today, electronic mail is gradually replacing conventional paper mail, and is soon to be the norm for everyone, not the novelty it is today. Unlike paper mail, e-mail messages are just too easy to intercept and scan for interesting keywords. This can be done easily, routinely, automatically, and undetectable on a grand scale. This is analogous to driftnet fishing – making a quantitative and qualitative Orwellian difference to the health of democracy.
Whitfield Diffie, pioneer of public-key cryptography:
In the 1790s, when the Bill of Rights was ratified, any two people could have a private conversation – with a certainty no one in the world enjoys today – by walking a few meters down the road and looking to see no one was hiding in the bushes. There were no recording devices, parabolic microphones, or laser interferometers bouncing off their eyeglasses. You will note that civilization survived. Many of us regard that period as a golden age in American political culture.
Ronald L. Rivest, of RSA fame. The Case against Regulating Encryption Technology:
But it is poor policy to clamp down indiscriminantly on a technology merely because some criminals might be able to use it to their advantage. For example, any U.S. citizen can freely buy a pair of gloves, even though some criminal might use them to commit a crime without leaving fingerprints. Anyone can freely buy a personal computer too, even though a burglar might use them to ransack a house without leaving fingerprints.
I rather like the glove analogy; let me expand on it a bit. Cryptography is a data protection technology just as gloves are a hand protection technology. Cryptography protects data from hackers, corporate spies and con artists, whereas gloves protect hands from cuts, scrapes, heat, cold and infection. The former can frustrate FBI wiretapping, and the latter can thwart FBI fingerprint analysis. Cryptography and gloves are both dirt-cheap and widely available. In fact, you can download good cryptographic software from the Internet for less than the price of a good pair of gloves!
