Do people have a
right to privacy? Good question.
The
fourth amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits the government from
searching people’s houses, papers, and effects without good reason, and goes on
to restrict the circumstances under which search warrants shall be issued.
Thus, privacy has been on the public agenda for over 200 years, at least in the
U.S.
What
has changed in the past decade is both the ease with which governments can spy
on their citizens and the ease with he citizens can prevent such spying. In the
18th century, for the government to search a citizen’s paper, it had
to send out a policeman on a horse to go to the citizen’s farm demanding to see
certain documents. It was a cumbersome procedure. Nowadays, telephone companies
and internet providers readily provide wiretaps when presented with search
warrants. It makes life much easier for the policeman and there is no danger of
falling of the horse.
Cryptography changes all that.
Anybody who goes to the trouble of down-loading and installing PGP and who uses
a well-guided alien-strength key can be fairly sure that nobody in the known
universe can read his e-mail, search warrant or no search warrant. Governments
well understand this and do not like it. Real privacy means it is much harder
for them to spy on criminals of all stripes, but it is also much harder for
them to spy on criminals of all stripes, but it is also much harder to spy on
journalist and political opponents. Consequently, some governments restrict of
forbid the use or export of cryptography. In France, for example, prior to
1999, all cryptography was banned unless he government was given the keys.
France
was not Alone. In April 1993, the U.S. Government announced its intention to
make a hardware crypto processor, the clipper
chip, the standard for all networked communication. In this way, it was
said, citizens privacy would be guaranteed. It also mentioned that the chip
provided the government with the ability to decrypt all traffic via a scheme
called Key escrow, which allowed the
government access to all the keys. However, it promised only to snoop when it
had a valid search warrant. Needless to say, a huge furor ensued, with privacy
advocates denouncing the whole plan and law enforcement officials praising it.
Eventually, the government backed down and dropped the idea.
A
large amount of information about electronic privacy is available at the
Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Web site, http://www.eff.org/
No comments:
Post a Comment