New York Newsday, January 22, 1997:

Viewpoint: Let Feds Overhear Cellular-Phone Talk

By David Kahn. David Kahn, an editor at Newsday, is the author 
of "The Codebreakers," recently revised.

The two Floridians who eavesdropped upon House Speaker Newt Gingrich 
and his colleagues have inadvertently raised a fundamental problem of 
electronic privacy vs. national security.

It deals with whether the government should have the right to listen 
to encrypted communications.

The Gingrich cellular-phone conversation was not encrypted, or put 
into code. But, if it had been, cryptosystems commercially available 
today could have made it unbreakable by any eavesdropper.

The politicians may regret not having scrambled their talk. Politically 
embarrassing as it was, though, the conversation was not criminal. But 
John and Alice Martin of Gainesville, Fla., who overheard the 
conversation, may have violated the Electronic Privacy Communication Act 
of 1986 - subjecting themselves to criminal penalties and civil action. 
On the other hand, such criminals as terrorists, drug-runners, kidnapers 
and child pornographers are increasingly using encryption to conceal 
their plans and activities, the FBI says.

This makes it harder for law-enforcement authorities to gain access to 
this information, as they now can do through wiretaps for unencrypted, 
or plain-language, conversations. James Kallstrom, an assistant director 
of the FBI and head of its New York office, said: "There have been many 
cases in which encryption has thwarted us big time. Most have been in 
the drug business, but there have been some in terrorism and with gangs 
and kidnaping." He declined to specify any cases because they are still 
in the courts.

To ensure continued access to many encrypted communications, the 
government has proposed - and renewed in an interim regulation Dec. 30 - 
a technique called key escrow. Manufacturers of telephone scramblers and 
other encryption equipment would register, or escrow, their devices and 
each device's individual key, with two agencies.

Then, when the police suspect that a criminal is encrypting messages, 
they would seek a court warrant to intercept the coded messages and to 
obtain from both agencies the keys that would enable them to understand 
the conversations. (Two agencies are used to make it harder for
unauthorized persons to use the key than if just one agency held it.) 
The police would use the intercepts to further their investigations or 
as evidence in court, as they do now.

Key escrow is supported by the FBI and the White House. But it is opposed 
on several grounds by several senators, among them Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) 
and Conrad Burns (R-Mont.), by many businesses and by the Electronic 
Privacy Information Center. They contend that key escrow wouldn't work. 
Criminals wouldn't use telephones with key-escrowed scramblers. Key 
escrow dilutes privacy. Modern cryptosystems give citizens a greater 
opportunity for confidentiality in their communications, and this 
opportunity should be seized. Key escrow harms business. What company, 
especially what foreign company, and indeed what private user would buy 
a cryptosystem that would let the U.S. government read its messages? 
Finally, firms can buy nonescrowed cryptosystems abroad, blocking the
process.

So what do its supporters say? Key escrow may not work all the time. But 
if enough telephones, such as the AT&T scrambler phone now on the market, 
include the key escrow mechanisms, criminals will inevitably use them. 
This will give police authorities access to their calls. International 
nonescrowed systems will indeed make it harder to read encrypted
messages, but this will not happen all at once, and every day that 
criminal messages can be heard is a gain. 

As for the loss of privacy and the expense to business, this is a price 
that must be paid to gain security. Airplane passengers have their 
luggage X-rayed and sometimes searched, pass through metal detectors, 
show photo identification - all costs in delay and intrusion. The world
is not what it was. There are bad guys out there, and I, for one, think 
that key escrow is a good way of at least slowing them down. 

[End]


