It's your life - and big brother knows it

Bastard Hat
    By David Auerbach

Back in the good old days, there was a lot less to be paranoid about. Sure, phone phreaks could rip off Bell Telephone, your credit card numbers could be passed around like fine wine, and occasionally someone would read your mail; but in general, your life was your own, at work and at play. As we move more of our lives onto computers, it seems the government wants to aggressively ensure that your private life always remains accessible it. If this makes you nervous, I tell you that the government is the least of your problems.

There's been a lot of news lately about the encryption debate. Encryption turns computer files into garbage undecipherable by anyone except those with the private information to decode them. The most common decoding method is when someone takes your public key (a chunk of data) and uses it in a program to encrypt some data, which can only be decrypted with your private key (which, hopefully, only you have). The government wants to restrict exporting of encryption technology by classifying it as arms (one professor was unsuccessfully prosecuted and told to register himself as an arms dealer), and obtain all private keys on demand, thus holding the means to read all encrypted data. In other words, the only people who would be able to read your encrypted stuff would be you and the FBI.

A recent bill, the Safety and Freedom through Encryption Act (SAFE), would have banned the government's ability to obtain private keys and reduced export restrictions. The National Security Council shot it down 45-1 last week and, instead, placed total control of export regulations in the hands of the military and provided for restriction of anything that the government could not decode. And FBI director Louis Freeh says he still needs all private keys to stop terrorism and drug dealing.

Among the more ardent supporters of regulating encryption are such "liberals" as Senator Bob Kerrey (Dem.-Neb.) and California's favorite senator, Dianne Feinstein (Dem.). As far as I've read, no one outside the government is in favor of any of it. The cyber-libertarians and technological business interests are screaming bloody murder. Even the ACLU has gotten in on the act, saying that an encryption scheme is speech, and as such protected by the First Amendment. And of course, the software companies don't like it. The intersection of strict civil libertarianism with the corporate sector is not a new one--witness Wired's irritating and naïve push for technological freedom in an anarcho-capitalist world unfettered by government interference--but more than ever the latter edges out the former. Issues of civil liberties are replaced by corporate liberties. The two are not compatible.

Within the corporate world, privacy is nonexistent. Most companies keep track of all email sent to and from their networks, to protect themselves from lawsuits. It is generally feasible to catch every single keystroke typed on a networked computer. Among other dicey propositions, giving your employer the right to literally watch your every word is now a standard part of any job offer. (Listening in on phones is old hat by now.) There's nothing technically wrong with this, if you don't mind being seen as a worker drone employed to shunt your entire mind, body, and soul into making someone else richer. It's implicit, of course, that the higher-ups won't care about your porn habit as much as whether you're talking about their investment strategy (or their porn habits). Meanwhile, Time is running cover stories about "The End of Privacy" and every web page you browse gleefully runs Java applets to figure out who will buy your name and address. Cyber-libertarians are in the unpleasant position of wanting protection from the very technology (and society) they created.

But these libertarians are old school; they lived in the days of Internet anarchy when everyone on-line was reasonably intelligent, knowledgeable about computers, and not obnoxious-criteria which WebTV(TM) users universally fail to meet. Faced with increasing irrelevance, the old-style anarchists are fading into self-devised obscurity and leaving space for a new, more ignoble creature that I call a corporate libertarian. Carl the Corporate Libertarian does computer work for a large or a small corporation, rakes in tons of dough (or hopes to someday), owns a German car, probably read too much Ayn Rand as a child, and wishes the government would leave him alone. Why? They're taking his money, they're needlessly regulating his company, and they're all idiots anyhow. Carl's opinions have nothing to do with civil liberties and everything to do with simple-minded narcissistic politics.

I have met many Carl clones: they are all young, selfish, and greedy and they have as much interest in privacy as they do in human rights or the environment. "Spy on me, threaten me, bore me, and do whatever you want to everyone else, but can I have my paycheck please?" Once more, Wired is at the forefront of this movement with its fawning portrayals of 25-year-old millionaires who helped the world by simply wanting to make a lot of money. The stronger the will to make money, the better the world is. And a couple of Carl's ilk will become CEOs and play merciless politics with the computer industry and the jobs of the people in it, so that when these technocrats have constructed arteries of terminals as the center of finance, Carl's views will have irreversibly poisoned the cause of equality in the country and divisively shut off workers' rights, job security, and of course, privacy. Carl is the very sort who, in competitive pursuit of fourth quarter earnings, will read through casual email to confirm that no one is doing anything that's bad for his company.

Which brings us back to cryptography. As non-profit groups do battle with the National Security Council and the FBI, they fail to see that they are siding with those who pose an even greater threat to privacy--folks like Carl. With each victory over the government, large corporations, computer or not, gain more of a right to evolve into megalithic entities that owe nothing to anyone, employees or customers. I'm hardly saying that Louis Freeh is anything but a monomaniacal update of Jack Lord, but it may be irrelevant that the FBI is reading your email if Goldman-Sachs already fired you for writing it. But don't worry too much, no one's out to get you; they're just keeping a watchful eye on you. Behave and everything should be all right.

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