Levy: Why Are We Fighting the Crypto Wars Again?


Great essay by Steven Levy on brief history of modern cryptography. Going back to the 90's when public key encryption first made encryption possible of wide-spread use.

The NSA came up with an elaborate scheme to do just that, called "key escrow." Its embodiment was the "Clipper Chip." This was a piece of silicon designed to put the all-important keys (which unscramble encrypted messages, and are supposed to be held only by those for whom the messages are directed) in that aforementioned escrow, so that when the government needed to decode a message, it could ask for and receive the key that changed ciphertext to plaintext.

It was an unwieldy and impractical idea -- especially since people who wanted security had options to buy stuff without Clipper Chips -- and its demise helped lead the government to the conclusion that people highly motivated to protect their information were going to use crypto anyway. In theory at least, intelligence and law enforcement agreed to accept the fact that crypto was here to stay, and if they wanted to gain access to encrypted communications and files, they would do so by warrants and their own cryptanalysis, and not by demanding that the systems themselves should be weakened.