re clipper considered harmful restated and amplified in article apr lehman com pmetzger snark shearson com perry e metzger writes you obviously haven t read the information about the system the chips put out serial number infomation into the cypher stream to allow themselves to be identified the system does not rely on registering people as owning particular phone units i am against the proposal but lets be accurate in our objections do not presume to tell me what i have and have not read the system may not rely upon registering people as owning particular phone units but it is necessary to know which phone units are likely to be used for some suspected criminal communication before you can obtain their unit keys from escrow this necessity raises the stakes in favor of a criminal s coercing or colluding use of some other person s clipper phone i will restate my assumptions more explicitly and amplify my argument the original title perhaps should have been distinction between legal and illegal cipher systems considered harmful but clipper considered harmful is not inaccurate and is more eye catching in the current context assumptions clipper is made available laws are passed to make use of cipher systems other than clipper illegal either on radio systems or on any common carrier system these laws also include enforcement authority to listen across the relevant radio spectrum or other medium characterize signals validate clipper wrappers detect probable use of non clipper ciphers and make such detection a cause for further action for escrowed keys to be useful some specific clipper chip must be associated with a suspected criminal this means that at a minimum some association between the common carrier s unique phone id esn and the clipper chip serial number n will be stored in a government database an observed pairing of n and esn other than the one recorded raises a red flag to reduce ordinary fraud the cellphone system which offers clipper will also be constructed with an esn mechanism much more tamper proof and much less spoofable than today s cellphones criminals want inscrutable communications some criminals are not entirely stupid or ignorant and will figure out both that clipper cellphones offer excellent security in normal circumstances and that they offer no security against law enforcement once a presumably legitimate wiretap order exists they will also figure out that the wiretap order must necessarily be against a specific cellphone because each one has a unique unit key criminals do not want to call attention to themselves because they are not stupid or ignorant or because they read netnews and because they know that their open use of a non clipper cipher is likely to be detected they will generally avoid using non clipper ciphers directly on some monitorable tappable channel they know that do so would raise a red flag putting a given cellphone if not a given person under immediate suspicion it is impractical to reverse engineer skipjack discover family key f and construct a functional clone of a clipper chip by and it will be very difficult to spoof a given clipper phone without immediate detection because it is difficult to obscure one s association to a specific phone by reprogramming or changing chips around the criminal will be motivated to find an intact phone which is associated with someone else a non stupid criminal will conclude that they can have clipper secure communications at least for some limited time t if they buy beg borrow or steal use of someone s phone in a way that prevents that person from reporting compromise of the phone for at least time t the encrypted communications might have been recorded and thus be retrievable later but the criminal can delay and quite likely evade discovery by destroying or abandoning the phone before t elapses it would be unusual for an innocent person to volunteer use of their clipper phone to someone else the honest subscriber doesn t want to pay someone else s bill and he doesn t want to fall under suspicion this leaves two sources of clipper phones for criminal use coercion and collusion coercion first theft bears a relatively low risk but also sometimes a low time until detection a few minutes if a phone is stolen from a car parked in front of a store a couple of weeks if a phone is stolen from someone who is away on vacation criminal commerce is likely to arise in stolen clipper phones with phones coming from risk inured poor criminals and cash coming from risk averse wealthy criminals someone who is extraordinarily motivated to gain a day or two of undetected communication like a terrorist could kill a person or hold them hostage the limited time before detection that a coerced phone is useful means that continuing criminal enterprises require a continuing supply of freshly coerced phones there would also be created a collusive commerce between relatively wealthy criminals and ignorant or don t care patsies who need money and who will submit to being paid in return for subscribing to clipper phone service for someone else s use criminals will learn that it is more to their advantage to coerce use of a clipper cellphone than it is to apply a non clipper cipher to a normal cellphone they will call much less attention to themselves or at least to their stolen phone this way the fact of a phone s use being coerced must first be reported before it can be identified as an interesting phone and have its keys obtained from escrow clipper also allows an extraordinary opportunity for the criminal to conceal use of super encryption an automated full system surveillance mechanism quite feasible across radio bandwidth which knows family key f can validate clipper wrappers and n esn associations but it cannot reveal in realtime the use of super encryption unless it knows all unit keys which we are being assured are only to be made available in two separate pieces upon specific wiretap like order whereas a criminal s use of any cipher within a normally cleartext medium would stand out a criminal s use of a non clipper cipher within a clipper medium would be very difficult to detect even ex post facto in bulk recordings as long as the association between criminal and specific clipper chip is fractured if you make use of this other cipher illegal per se then you can charge the criminal with this if you can identify the true criminal he ll be using someone else s phone but you ll have no evidence to help you against whatever traditional crime he might have been planning you will not even be able to detect that unusual encrypted communications are occurring until you identify specific phones and obtain their keys from escrow the gangster and terrorist are thus arguably more not less secure than they were before clipper came along i therefore consider clipper harmful because it does not provide absolute privacy to the honest public against aggressive or dishonest government if other ciphers are proscribed it engenders new types of direct criminal threat to the honest public it provides an extraordinarily effective mechanism for criminals to hide their use of some other cipher making it more difficult than ever even to gain notice that unusual communications are occurring and that plans for some criminal act might be in progress if other ciphers are proscribed lazy investigators and prosecutors are more likely to pursue the easily quantifiable cipher use crime than they are the traditional and directly harmful crimes which key escrow is claimed to help against if other ciphers are proscribed the stage is set for witch hunting of illegal cipher use because any computer can be used as a cipher machine brad yearwood brad optilink com uunet pyramid optilink brad petaluma ca
