http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/031222/usnews/22secrecy.htm
The above article talks a lot about how secrecy is the hallmark of the current USA administration. It includes this one snippet on page 8:
"Secret evidence of a different kind comes into play through a little-noticed effect of the U.S.A. Patriot Act. A key provision allows information from surveillance approved for intelligence gathering to be used to convict a defendant in criminal court."
Skipping past the rhetoric, and without examining the provisions of that act in detail, this signals a fairly significant shift in the threat models faced by ordinary civilians in the jurisdictions concerned. (By this, we include of course financial cryptography.)
In the past, it was possible to treat ones transmissions as protected from the average plausible attacks by the people similar to oneself. Encrypted email to your attorney was secure against, say, a bribed or nosy system administrator. An encrypted spreadsheet of ones hotel bills was secure against an ex-spouse's divorce attorney.
In addition to that, you took reasonable care of ones own machine, and hey presto, we had a security model for everyone. The closing statements of such a model said something like "secure against the threats we know about and expect. Does not include attacks by the intelligence services..."
In practical economic terms, this was grand. The common view amongst most practitioners was that if you were up against the spooks, then that was a whole different ballgame (and, we charged more...). We, as a society, relied on a shared understanding with the spooks that if they shared their product with civilians, it would weaken their effectiveness against real national security threats. In exchange for giving the spooks carte blanche with their activities, we also reduced society's costs in protecting against over-empowered public officials.
Now, we are seeing a progressive blurring of the lines of demarcation. This will make threat assessment much harder in the future. It will no longer be trivially possible to draw a line between civilian and military means, and say, for example, that "national technical means" are excluded from our threat model. It may now be necessary, for all sorts of civilian cryptography scenarios, to consider attacks by intelligence agencies operating under the direction of civilian agencies.
Take the office of the Leader of the Opposition. In the past, it was plausible to chortle and scoff at the notion that you needed to protect politically inspired attacks. We can no longer take for granted that a self respecting intelligence agent would protect their information and activities from politics. A rational analysis would now show there are just too many ways for spook material to be drafted into the re-election campaign.
Whether this means that cryptography practitioners should insist on very high standards in all crypto (as the no-risk cryptography school has it) or whether we should insist on lowering standards to increase adoption rates (as the economic cryptography school has it) is, I consider, an orthogonal issue.
What is clear is that the demand for crypto, and lots of it, will get stronger. More and more people will demand more and more cryptographic protection, as a routine feature in more and more applications. That's the inevitable consequence of more and more politicians pushing more and more power out to bureaucrats with private agendas.
iang
PS: in practice, this separation may have been illusory, as it appears to have only been maintained in "rich" countries, and only some of those. (Coincidentally, the ones that pioneered the Internet, it seems.) One of the threats that groups like cryptorights.org consider routine is that of the local security services working in concert with economic interests.
Posted by iang at December 15, 2003 05:06 PM | TrackBack