[iwar] [fc:]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-01-14 19:44:35
Next message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:Social.Engineering.Fundamentals,.Part.II:.Combat.Strategies]"
Previous message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [NewsBits] NewsBits - 01/14/02 (fwd)"
Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
Message-Id: <200201150344.g0F3iZH09930@red.all.net>
To: iwar@onelist.com (Information Warfare Mailing List)
Organization: I'm not allowed to say
From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
Mailing-List: list iwar@yahoogroups.com; contact iwar-owner@yahoogroups.com
Precedence: bulk
Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2002 19:44:35 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [iwar] [fc:]
Reply-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Freedom Fighters of the Digital World

 At a Time When Many of Us Are Gung-Ho About Sacrificing Personal Freedoms
to Combat Terror, the Electronic Frontier Foundation Just Wants to Say No.

 SCOTT HARRIS, Scott Harris last wrote for the magazine for the December
1999 millennium issue

We're bombing Afghanistan, anthrax is in the mail, and all across America it
looks like Stars and Stripes forever. It is the evening of Oct. 11, one
month into the war on terrorism, and Congress is cooking up something that
will be called the USA Patriot Act. This sweeping law includes a dramatic
expansion of Internet surveillance, unprecedented sharing of information
between government agencies, stiffer penalties for computer crimes and
greater power to detain noncitizens.

For many of us, that's just fine. If personal freedoms are to be sacrificed,
polls show that a majority of Americans aren't just willing, they're
gung-ho. Urgent times, urgent measures. Judged against the horror of Sept.
11 and now our daily dread--those invisible spores, the occasional drive
across a bridge--what's a little electronic eavesdropping among patriotic
Americans anyway?

But inside a half-empty auditorium at the San Francisco Public Library, four
civil liberties attorneys have come together on a panel to challenge the new
conventional wisdom. The audience is up for the challenge, and when the
floor is open for questions, a slender man with long wispy hair and a
scraggly beard takes a turn at the mike. He doesn't give his name, but many
here recognize John Gilmore, one of the brains behind Sun Microsystems and
one of the guiding spirits of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, perhaps
America's most technologically astute civil liberties group--and no doubt
one of the funkiest. In a soft voice, the computer scientist explains what
is troubling him: the scarcity of news surrounding all those people, then
numbering about 500, who have been rounded up in the terrorism
investigation. Who are they? Why are they being held? Does anybody know
anything? "Who's representing these people and trying to get them out?"

The panelists' silence leaves Gilmore exasperated.

"Are all the civil rights organizations afraid to step up to defend
potential terrorists?"

Say this about the leaders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation: They are
not afraid to speak their minds. They are not afraid to push back.

sometimes described as an "american civil liberties union for nerds," the
Electronic Frontier Foundation was launched in 1990 by an illustrious group
of Internet pioneers troubled by what they considered to be the government's
clueless, ham-handed efforts to police the new medium. "Nobody was thinking
about extending the Constitution into cyberspace," recalls co-founder
Mitchell Kapor, the wealthy Lotus software mogul. Who but computer
scientists would argue that binary code is a form of speech entitled to
First Amendment protection?

To high-tech pros and policy wonks, the EFF is well-known for its opposition
to the regulation of encryption. Hollywood and the publishing industry know
it as the loyal opposition in battles over digital copy law, which the EFF
believes is so restrictive that it frustrates innovation. "What we're
working on is really cutting-edge stuff to protect the rights of everyone,
even if they don't realize the significance of it," says EFF executive
director Shari Steele.

Non-nerds may more easily grasp the EFF's unyielding interpretation of First
Amendment freedoms and the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable
searches. It has poured resources into protecting the rights of scientists
and journalists to publish online. It defends the right to make anonymous
postings online, insofar as the posters honor laws governing libel and trade
secrets. In defending its principles, the EFF may seem to casual observers
to be bent on making the world a safer place for computer hackers, copyright
pirates, cowardly commentators and people who think happiness is a warm Aibo
robot puppy.

(When Sony complained that Web sites set up by Aibo owners to share
programming tricks were infringing on its copyright, the EFF took up the
hobbyists' cause.) But the organization now sees itself on the front line of
the debate over security in the age of terror, and it is only too happy to
have its dissenting voice heard amid the clamor.

Its assessment of the USA Patriot Act (an acronym for Uniting and
Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept
and Obstruct Terrorism) has been especially critical. Terrorism, says EFF
legal director Cindy Cohn, has been used to justify a law enforcement power
grab that threatens fundamental freedoms. Had the same surveillance and
wiretap laws existed a year ago, she argues, they would not have prevented
the terror attacks on Sept. 11--and now Americans are shouldering the burden
of intelligence failures of federal authorities.

"The civil liberties of ordinary Americans have taken a tremendous blow,
especially in the right to privacy," Cohn says in a 20-page legal analysis
of the Internet and computer crime sections of the Patriot Act that was
distributed to more than 100 civil liberties groups. "Be careful what you
put in that Google search. The government may now spy on Web surfing of
innocent Americans . . . by merely telling a judge anywhere in the U.S. that
the spying could lead to information that is 'relevant' to an ongoing
criminal investigation."

(The judge may not reject the request; his role is simply to issue and
record it.)

What makes this form of surveillance more worrisome, cyber libertarians say,
is how the Internet links people in ways that the non-virtual world does
not. Ask yourself: Have you ever received e-mail from a terror suspect? Ever
been on the same listserv or in the same chat room? Book the same flight,
frequent the same Web site? Not only would you not know, Cohn says, but you
also wouldn't know whether the feds had snooped on your Web activities and
compiled a secret dossier. Not only could authorities abuse such
information, she suggests, but so could rogue agents.

Americans, Cohn says, wouldn't tolerate such scrutiny of postal or telephone
communications, or library research. What makes the electronic realm
different? The EFF believes its role is to sound the public alarm and watch
for abuses by authorities that need to be challenged in court.

Indeed, libertarians from the left and right see the expanded Internet
surveillance as part of an authoritarian lurch that includes President
Bush's calls for military tribunals conducted of noncitizens accused of
terrorism; the dragnet that led to detentions of 1,400 individuals, only a
small number now thought to have suspicious links to the hijackers; and the
Justice Department's efforts to interview 5,000 men, most of whom are
Muslim.

Libertarians get a sense of deja vu listening to Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft
portray opposition to such measures as "aiding" the enemy. They recall how
dissidents were rounded up in the buildup toward World War I, Japanese
Americans were interned during World War II and a Communist witch hunt
ruined lives in the Cold War.

Says Gilmore: "There's a McCarthy era every 20 or 30 years." Only now,
digital technology has raised the stakes. J. Edgar Hoover would drool over
the tools that now exist to gather, transmit, store and interpret
information, and the technology is only getting more powerful. Broad
Internet surveillance, some civil libertarians say, could be a first step
toward the creation of a vast, permanent digital dragnet. Says Brad
Templeton, a 41-year-old Internet entrepreneur and the EFF's chairman: "I
sit in fear of the next attack not only because of who it might hurt but
because of where it will take this debate."

what templeton fears is something many americans would welcome. Imagine a
nationwide high-tech security system as a fixed defense not only against
terrorism but all sorts of criminal behavior. The high-tech fix could take
many forms. A new generation of mobile products--from cars to cell phones to
firearms--could be equipped with a kind of super-LoJack transponder linking
Global Positioning System satellites to help authorities locate stolen goods
and suspects. A national ID system using "smart cards" embedded with
microchips carrying digitized personal data, many argue, could dramatically
strengthen identity-verification practices. Airport security could employ
advanced X-ray screening that looks through clothes.

Privacy concerns pose a political obstacle to such technologies, but
momentum is gathering behind another powerful idea: the use of biometric
"face-recognition" software to augment security cameras that are already
commonplace in many private and public places. When Wall Street reopened
after Sept. 11 with a deep swoon, the rocketing exceptions were biometrics
developers such as Viisage Technology, Visionics and Imagis. The software
makes a "face print" based on a measurement of features and compares it to a
database of images. A Visionics system was tested at the 2000 Super Bowl in
Tampa Bay, and company officials have proposed such a system for Reagan
National Airport in Washington, D.C. On Oct. 31, Viisage's system became the
first to be used in an airport, capturing images of travelers at Fresno
Yosemite International shortly before they pass through metal detectors.
Whenever the software suggests that an individual resembles a subject in the
database, security is alerted. Tom Colastoti, Viisage's chief executive
officer, says most false positives are quickly resolved. And biometrics, he
adds, should minimize racial profiling.

Most law-abiding people, Colastoti says, would consider face-recognition
capabilities helpful. Travelers already have their carry-on bags X-rayed and
are often searched as they pass through metal detectors, which frequently
buzz and trigger a more thorough search with a hand-held metal detector.
After all of that, Colastoti says, "People are going to tell me having your
face scanned in a nanosecond is an invasion of privacy? I don't get it." A
lot of people don't get it. "People with something to hide are the ones who
need 'privacy' the most," Times columnist John Balzar wrote last November.
Polls suggest that such reasoning has become more common since Sept. 11.
"It's insidiously hard to argue with that," Templeton allows. "But if we are
under surveillance, we are less free. We censor ourselves."

Just look at how the political climate has already censored us by stifling
dissent, he says. "My little phrase has been that 'America speaking with one
voice is un-American.' " Just because I'm paranoid. Type that phrase into
the Google search engine and, before long, you'll be under the impression
that techies simply aren't the trusting sort. You'll surf sites put up by
computer pros who recommend encryption software such as PGP (Pretty Good
Privacy). You, too, can mask your e-mail from, say, your boss, your staff,
your spouse, your children, maybe your government--which is no guarantee
that the mask won't get ripped off. Even before Sept. 11, many techies
subscribed to another old one-liner: If you're not paranoid, you just
haven't been paying attention.

The fondness that techies have for cryptology reflects a dynamic of love and
fear that is very much at the root of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The love is reflected in the utopian view of cyberspace shared by Gilmore
and others who embrace the Internet Age mantra, "Information wants to be
free."

"In the early days, the Net was free," says computer scientist Dave Farber,
a 67-year-old University of Pennsylvania professor. An EFF board member
since the mid-'90s, Farber has witnessed the evolution of the medium since
1968, when he first got on the Arpanet, the Internet's precursor that was
developed by the Department of Defense and largely used in academia. "It was
an information barter economy. You gave things to people, they gave things
to you. It was that way for a long time, until relatively recently . . . It
was almost like the utopian socialism attitude of the '20s and '30s." The
philosophical divide "depends on when you came on the Net and what your
motivations are."

As the Silicon Valley began its boom, the bohemians of cyberspace sometimes
found each other at "The Well," an online bulletin board community launched
in 1985 by environmentalist Stewart Brand, founding editor of the
Sausalito-based Whole Earth Catalog. The Well (which stands for Whole Earth
'Lectronic Link) had some interesting, brilliant, influential devotees who
included Mitch Kapor and John Perry Barlow. Kapor was a disaffected
Transcendental Meditation instructor whose search for enlightenment led him
to computer science at MIT and the crafting of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet,
the most popular application of the mid-'80s. When not running his Wyoming
cattle ranch, EFF co-founder Barlow was penning lyrics for the Grateful Dead
or writing philosophical musings about digital technology.

One day Kapor read an article that Barlow had posted on The Well describing
a surreal encounter with an FBI agent he'd previously met after some cattle
were rustled from his ranch. This time the agent was trying to figure out if
Barlow was in cahoots with some outlaws who were either, as Barlow would
later write, "a dread band of info-terrorists," or possibly just a
disgruntled Apple employee distributing source code. The agent's "errand was
complicated by a fairly complete unfamiliarity with computer technology."
Kapor could relate; he too had been questioned by the FBI. The feds, he
recalls, seemed incapable of distinguishing brainy kids fooling around on
computers for kicks and knowledge--the real-world equivalent of trespassing
and minor vandalism--from more serious criminals dealing in theft and
espionage. On a cross-country flight in his business jet, Kapor phoned
Barlow and detoured to the airport nearest Pinedale, Wyo. The next day, The
Well heralded plans for what would become the Electronic Frontier
Foundation.

John Gilmore was the first to sign on, kicking in a six-figure contribution
and considerable energy. Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computers, wrote
a hefty check. Stewart Brand joined the first board.

Five years before the ACLU handled its first Internet case, the EFF
pioneered the field in a pair of landmark cases. The first involved Steve
Jackson Games, a Texas-based company that had been raided by federal agents
investigating hacking. The EFF brought a suit that established that e-mail
is protected under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Law
enforcement would be required to have a warrant describing each message or
e-mail participant before the mail could be read. Later, the EFF
successfully challenged the government's ban on the export of encryption on
behalf of a mathematician who wanted to discuss cryptology research online.
In that case, the court found that software code is protected as speech by
the First Amendment.

Since then, the EFF has labored to shed the image that it is little more
than a "hacker defense fund." Today the foundation's seven-member board
includes law professors Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University and Pamela
Samuelson of UC Berkeley, recognized experts in technology law who help lend
pragmatic ballast to the EFF. But the abiding presence of Barlow and Gilmore
through EFF's sometimes rocky history has helped sustain the idyllic vision
of cyberspace. "Yeah, I'm a utopian," Barlow says. "But I think I'm a
relatively realistic utopian. I see no problem with aiming for the moon
knowing you're not going to hit it."

This may help explain Barlow's provocative prophecy on Sept. 11. In an
e-mail to about 1,000 friends and associates, he likened the attack on the
World Trade Center and Pentagon to "the Reichstag fire that provided the
social opportunity for the Nazi takeover of Germany . . . Control freaks
will dine on this day for the rest of our lives." He went on to write: "And
please, let us forgive those who committed these appalling crimes. If we
hate them, we will become them." (This from a man who, as a Republican Party
official in Wyoming, helped elect Dick Cheney to Congress.) Barlow was
speaking for himself, not the EFF, which tends to be more diplomatic while
making some, but not all, of the same general points.

At least Barlow hastened to note in his e-mail that he didn't think American
authoritarians, unlike the Nazis who started the Reichstag fire, "had a
direct role in perpetrating this mind-blistering tragedy." But that, he
says, didn't prevent "plenty of ugly responses," including one death threat.
Barlow laughs as he points out that the threat was just the sort of
anonymous online speech that the EFF defends, at least in principle.

the electronic frontier Foundation's virtual headquarters is its Web site
(www.eff.org), which its leaders boast is one of "the most linked to" on the
Internet. It's physical quarters started in Boston, Kapor's base at the
time. In 1992 it moved to Washington, D.C., to focus on lobbying, recruiting
ACLU chief legislative counsel Jerry Berman as its new executive director
and attracting financial support from high-tech corporations. But the
Beltway culture and the pressure to compromise created turmoil. Berman
departed in 1994 and launched the like-minded Center for Democracy and
Technology. The difference is more style than substance, with CDT focusing
on lobbying and building consensus on Internet issues from inside the
political establishment, and the EFF trying to effect change through the
courts. Berman took along some staff and corporate sponsors, which now
include AOL Time Warner, AT&amp;T, Intel, IBM and Microsoft. He suggests that
the EFF focuses too narrowly on litigation as a means of influence. "They're
great in their space but they have to broaden their space." The EFF's
pragmatists, Berman says, "will follow the yellow brick road, and the yellow
brick road will lead back to Washington."

In 1995, Kapor quit EFF's board ("I was burned out," he says now) and the
EFF moved to San Francisco, a countercultural fit next door to the Silicon
Valley. A brick building in the heart of the Mission District that once
served as a church supply store is now the home of EFF, a bustling dot-org
living amid the ghosts of dead dot-coms. It is not a large operation, with
an annual budget of less than $2 million, 15 employees and dozens of
volunteers and interns, supported by 5,000 members. An American flag, such a
common sight these days, is displayed above a staff member's desk. A closer
look reveals that, instead of white stars, the blue field is arrayed with
tiny corporate logos.

Mitch Kapor happens to be in the office this autumn day, "becoming
reengaged." He dropped by for a briefing from EFF attorneys on the
anti-terror legislation, preparing for a soiree of high-tech potentates
where security and privacy will be discussed. Yes, the law goes too far,
Kapor says, and yes, he worries that billions could be wasted trying to
build a digital dragnet. "We need more people who speak Farsi," he says.
"I'll vote for secure cockpit doors."

This is an appeal civil libertarians are trying to make, saying there are
smarter approaches to terrorism that won't cost billions and won't infringe
on freedoms. Serious terrorists, they say, will be clever enough to slip
through the dragnet while innocents are ensnared. But perhaps the more
effective argument involves a bit of rhetorical flag waving. "President Bush
said they attacked us because we are a free society," EFF executive director
Shari Steele says. "If we give up our freedoms because of the attacks, they
win." "I mean," John Gilmore is saying in that half-empty auditorium in San
Francisco, "are civil rights organizations afraid to defend potential
terrorists?"

ACLU attorney Ann Brick musters a response. "The government is not releasing
names, and in a way that's the good news and the bad news." Innocent people
won't be tainted by the hint of suspicion, she says, but "the secrecy means
no one knows who they are or why they're being held."

Every war has its Catch-22s. Today's paradox is this: How can a society
based on freedom protect itself by sacrificing liberties? But how can it
protect itself without such sacrifices?

On this night, Brick seeks out John Gilmore afterward to thank him for his
question. Secrecy, they agree, is a police-state tactic that needs to be
challenged. Gilmore takes Brick's card and offers help: "If it takes money,
I'll send money."

Later Gilmore smiles when he is asked if he thinks the EFF's work is more
vital than ever before. No, not really, he says. "What we've been doing has
been needed all along. You always need the Constitution. Right?" 

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Tiny Wireless Camera under $80!
Order Now! FREE VCR Commander!
Click Here - Only 1 Day Left!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/WoOlbB/7.PDAA/ySSFAA/kgFolB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

------------------
http://all.net/ 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Next message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:Social.Engineering.Fundamentals,.Part.II:.Combat.Strategies]"
Previous message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [NewsBits] NewsBits - 01/14/02 (fwd)"
Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : 2002-12-31 02:15:03 PST