why.
Because you're going to be filling out your paperwork in
quintuplicate to get a tap, just like you always do, because you don't
have your own pet court like the NSA does. And for you, it probably
is going to seem pretty much like the status quo used to be. But in
the meantime, you will have armed the enemies of the United States
around the world with a terrible weapon. Not your court-ordered,
civilized Digital Telephony -- their raw and tyrannical Digital
Telephony.
You're gonna be using it to round up wiseguys in streetgangs,
and people like Saddam Hussein are gonna be using it to round up
democratic activists and national minorities. You're going to
strengthen the hand of despotism around the world, and then you're
going to have to deal with the hordes of state-supported
truckbombers these rogue governments are sending our way after
annihilating their own internal opposition by using your tools. You
want us to put an axe in your hand and you're promising to hit us
with only the flat side of it, but the Chinese don't see it that way;
they're already licensing fax machines and they're gonna need a lot
of new hardware to gear up for Tiananmen II.
I've talked a long time, but I want to finish by saying
something about the NSA guy's one real and actual argument. The
terrors of the Brave New World of free individual encryption. When
he called encryption enthusiasts "romantic" he was dead-on, and
when he said the results of spreading encryption were unpredictable
and dangerous he was also dead-on, because people, encryption is not
our friend. Encryption is a mathematical technique, and it has about
as much concern for our human well-being as the fact that seventeen
times seventeen equals two hundred and eighty-nine. It does, but
that doesn't make us sleep any safer in our beds.
Encrypted networks worry the hell out of me and they have
since the mid 1980s. The effects are very scary and very
unpredictable and could be very destabilizing. But even the Four
Horsemen of Kidporn, Dope Dealers, Mafia and Terrorists don't worry
me as much as totalitarian governments. It's been a long century,
and we've had enough of them.
Our battle this century against totalitarianism has left
terrible scars all over our body politic and the threat these people
pose to us is entirely and utterly predictable. You can say that the
devil we know is better than the devil we don't, but the devils we
knew were ready to commit genocide, litter the earth with dead, and
blow up the world. How much worse can that get? Let's not build
chips and wiring for our police and spies when only their police and
spies can reap the full benefit of them.
