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|           Newsday, Tuesday, February 22, 1994, Viewpoints            |
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                    The Clipper Chip Will Block Crime
                                    
                          By Dorothy E. Denning


   Hidden among the discussions of the information highway is a fierce
debate, with huge implications for everyone.  It centers on a tiny
computer chip called the Clipper, which uses sophisticated coding to
scramble electronic communications transmitted through the phone
system.

   The Clinton administration has adopted the chip, which would allow
law enforcement agencies with court warrants to read the Clipper codes
and eavesdrop on terrorists and criminals.  But opponents say that, if
this happens, the privacy of law-abiding individuals will be a risk.
They want people to be able to use their own scramblers, which the
government would not be able to decode.

   If the opponents get their way, however, all communications on the
information highway would be immune from lawful interception.  In a
world threatened by international organized crime, terrorism, and rogue
governments, this would be folly.  In testimony before Congress, Donald
Delaney, senior investigator with the New York State Police, warned
that if we adopted an encoding standard that did not permit lawful
intercepts, we would have havoc in the United States.

   Moreover, the Clipper coding offers safeguards against casual
government intrusion.  It requires that one of the two components of
a key embedded in the chip be kept with the Treasury Department and the
other component with the Commerce Department's National Institute of
Standards and Technology.  Any law enforcement official wanting to
wiretap would need to obtain not only a warrant but the separate
components from the two agencies.  This, plus the superstrong code and
key system would make it virtually impossible for anyone, even corrupt
government officials, to spy illegally.

   But would terrorists use Clipper?  The Justice Department has
ordered $8 million worth of Clipper scramblers in the hope that they
will become so widespread and convenient that everyone will use them.
Opponents say that terrorists will not be so foolish as to use
encryption to which the government holds the key but will scramble
their calls with their own code systems.  But then who would have
thought that the World Trade Center bombers would have been stupid
enough to return a truck that they had rented?

   Court-authorized interception of communications has been essential
for preventing and solving many serious and often violent crimes,
including terrorism, organized crime, drugs, kidnaping, and political
corruption.  The FBI alone has had many spectacular successes that
depended on wiretaps.  In a Chicago case code-named RUKBOM, they
prevented the El Rukn street gang, which was acting on behalf of the
Libyan government, from shooting down a commercial airliner using a
stolen military weapons system.

   To protect against abuse of electronic surveillance, federal
statutes impose stringent requirements on the approval and execution
of wiretaps.  Wiretaps are used judiciously (only 846 installed
wiretaps in 1992) and are targeted at major criminals.

   Now, the thought of the FBI wiretapping my communications appeals to
me about as much as its searching my home and seizing my papers.
But the Constitution does not give us absolute privacy from
court-ordered searches and seizures, and for good reason.  Lawlessness
would prevail.

   Encoding technologies, which offer privacy, are on a collision
course with a major crime-fighting tool: wiretapping.  Now the
Clipper chip shows that strong encoding can be made available in a way
that protects private communications but does not harm society if it
gets into the wrong hands.  Clipper is a good idea, and it needs
support from people who recognize the need for both privacy and
effective law enforcement on the information highway.

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