This motive recently led the Clinton Administration to propose the "Clipper Chip" or "Skipjack," a government- approved encryption device to be placed in telephones. Sets of keys for the Clipper Chip would be placed in escrow with two different government agencies, and when the FBI felt the need to listen in on an encrypted telephone conversation, the FBI would get a warrant from a judge and the keys would be handed over.
Enthusiasts for private encryption have pointed out a number of difficulties with the Clipper Chip proposal. First of all, it is extremely unlikely that criminals, foreign spies, or terrorists would be foolish enough to use an encryption technique designed by the NSA and approved by the FBI. Second, the main marketing use for encryption is not domestic American encryption, but international encryption. Serious business users of serious encryption are far more alarmed by state-supported industrial espionage overseas, than they are about the safety of phone calls made inside the United States. They want encryption for communications made overseas to people overseas -- but few foreign business people would buy an encryption technology knowing that the US Government held the exclusive keys.
It is therefore likely that the Clipper Chip could never be successfully exported by American manufacturers of telephone and computer equipment, and therefore it could not be used internationally, which is the primary market for encryption. Machines with a Clipper Chip installed would become commercial white elephants, with no one willing to use them but American cops, American spies, and Americans with nothing to hide.
A third objection is that the Skipjack algorithm has been classified "Secret" by the NSA and is not available for open public testing. Skeptics are very unwilling to settle for a bland assurance from the NSA that the chip and its software are unbreakable except with the official keys.
The resultant controversy was described by Business Week as "Spy Vs Computer Nerd." A subterranean power- struggle has broken out over the mastery of cryptographic science, and over basic ownership of the electronic bit- stream.
Much is riding on the outcome.
Will powerful, full-fledged, state-of-the-art encryption belong to individuals, including such unsavory individuals as drug traffickers, child pornographers, black-market criminal banks, tax evaders, software pirates, and the possible future successors of the Nazis?
Or will the NSA and its allies in the cryptographic status-quo somehow succeed in stopping the march of scientific progress in cryptography, and in cramming the commercial crypto-genie back into the bottle? If so, what price will be paid by society, and what damage wreaked on our traditions of free scientific and technical inquiry?
One thing seems certain: cryptography, this most obscure and smothered of mathematical sciences, is out in the open as never before in its long history. Impassioned, radicalized cryptographic enthusiasts, often known as "cypherpunks," are suing the NSA and making it their business to spread knowledge of cryptographic techniques as widely as possible, "through whatever means necessary." Small in number, they nevertheless have daring, ingenuity, and money, and they know very well how to create a public stink. In the meantime, their more conventional suit-and-tie allies in the Software Publishers Association grumble openly that the Clipper Chip is a poorly-conceived fiasco, that cryptographic software is peddled openly all over the planet, and that "the US Government is succeeding only in crippling an American industry's exporting ability."
The NSA confronted the worst that America's adversaries had to offer during the Cold War, and the NSA prevailed. Today, however, the secret masters of cryptography find themselves confronting what are perhaps the two most powerful forces in American society: the computer revolution, and the profit motive. Deeply hidden from the American public through forty years of Cold War terror, the NSA itself is for the first time, exposed to open question and harrowing reassessment.
Will the NSA quietly give up the struggle, and expire as secretly and silently as it lived its forty-year Cold War existence? Or will this most phantomlike of federal agencies decide to fight for its survival and its scientific pre-eminence?
And if this odd and always-secret agency does choose to fight the new cryptography, then -- how?
"The Dead Collider"
It certainly seemed like a grand idea at the time, the time being 1982, one of the break-the-bank years of the early Reagan Administration.
The Europeans at CERN, possessors of the world's largest particle accelerator, were planning to pave their massive Swiss tunnel with new, superconducting magnets. This would kick the European atom-smasher, already powerful, up to a massive 10 trillion electron volts.
In raw power, this would boost the Europeans decisively past their American rivals. America's most potent accelerator in 1982, Fermilab in Illinois, could manage a meager 2 TeV. And Fermilab's Tevatron, though upgraded several times, was an aging installation.
A more sophisticated machine, ISABELLE at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, had been planned in 1979 as Fermilab's successor at the forefront of American particle physics. But by 1982, it was clear that ISABELLE's ultra-sophisticated superconducting magnets had severe design troubles. The state-of-the-art bungling at Brookhaven was becoming an open embarrassment to the American particle-physics community. And even if the young ISABELLE facility overcame those problems and got their magnets to run, ISABELLE was intended to sacrifice raw power for sophistication; at best, ISABELLE would yield a feeble .8 TeV.
In August 1982, Leon Lederman, then director of Fermilab, made a bold and visionary proposal. In a conference talk to high-energy physicists gathered in Colorado, Lederman proposed cancelling both ISABELLE and the latest Fermilab upgrade, in pursuit of a gigantic American particle accelerator that would utterly dwarf the best the Europeans had to offer, now or in the foreseeable future. He called it "The Machine in the Desert."
The "Desertron" (as Lederman first called it) would be the largest single scientific instrument in the world, employing a staff of more than two thousand people, plus students, teachers and various properly awestruck visiting scholars from overseas. It would be 20 times more powerful than Fermilab, and full sixty times more powerful than CERN circa 1982. The accelerator's 54 miles of deep tunnels, lined with hard- vacuum beamguides and helium- refrigerated giant magnets, would be fully the size of the Washington Beltway.
The cost: perhaps 3 billion dollars. It was thought that the cash- flush Japanese, who had been very envious of CERN for some time, would be willing to help the Americans in exchange for favored status at the complex.
The goal of the Desertron, or at least its target of choice, would be the Higgs scalar boson, a hypothetical subatomic entity theoretically responsible for the fact that other elementary particles have mass. The Higgs played a prominent part at the speculative edges of quantum theory's so-called "Standard Model," but its true nature and real properties were very much in doubt.
The Higgs boson would be a glittering prize indeed, though not so glittering as the gigantic lab itself. After a year of intense debate within the American high- energy-physics community, Lederman's argument won out.
His reasoning was firmly in the tradition of 20th- century particle physics. There seemed little question that massive power and scale of the Desertron was the necessary next step for real progress in the field.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Ernest Rutherford (who coined the memorable catch-phrase, "All science is either physics or stamp-collecting") discovered the nucleus of the atom with a mere five million electron volts. Rutherford's lab equipment not much more sophisticated than string and sealing-wax. To get directly at neutrons and protons, however, took much more energy -- a billion electron volts and a cyclotron. To get quark effects, some decades later, required ten billion volts and a synchrotron. To make quarks really stand up and dance in their full quantum oddity, required a hundred billion electron volts and a machine that was miles across. And to get at the Higgs boson would need at least ten trillion eV, and given that the fantastically powerful collision would be a very messy affair, a full forty trillion -- two particle beams of twenty TeV each, colliding head-on -- was a much safer bet.