Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption

Amazon.com
There was a time when cryptography--the making and breaking of secret codes--was of interest only to spies, diplomats, and the occasional eccentric. Those days are over, and the reason, as Diffie and Landau explain, is that secret codes have become the key to preserving traditional notions of privacy at a time when technology is rapidly altering the nature of human communication.

When the vast majority of conversations happened face to face, keeping them private was a simple matter of stepping away from the listening crowd. But the growing number of conversations that take place over easy-to-intercept phone lines and e-mail channels requires more sophisticated safeguards. Above all, it requires online encryption tools of the highest grade, and this book does a good job of explaining how these tools work, both in principle and in practice. It does a better job, though, of explaining why the tools matter. The intense political battles that have surrounded digital cryptography in recent years are a testament to the profound political implications of privacy in the online era, and Diffie and Landau have delivered an admirably thorough overview of both the struggles and the stakes. If at times their thoroughness bogs them down in dry recitations of detail, their book at least generates more light than heat, and that can hardly be said of most contributions to the cryptography debate so far. --Julian Dibbell


From Publishers Weekly
Comsec, sigint, NSA, NIST, DES, Clipper chip, key escrow?such technobabble related to intelligence-gathering can baffle the uninitiated. This authoritative treatise helps unveil some of the mystery and puts contemporary freedom, privacy and security issues in perspective. After explaining basic concepts of cryptography, the authors cover the history of 20th-century intelligence gathering, then recount the long, discouraging saga of the U.S. government's invasions of its citizens' privacy. In World War II, census data were used illegally to round up Japanese Americans. In the 1950s and '60s, the CIA read private mail, and in the 1970s, it monitored research requests in public libraries. The electronic spying of our security agencies is not even a law-enforcement bargain?wiretapping is costly and produces arguably modest results. Issues of the 1990s include the 1992 Digital Telephone Proposal, the legal vicissitudes of "Pretty Good Privacy," and the government's attempts to require key escrow (storage of keys so that the government can crack coded messages). As in earlier times, we still see competition between the various security bureaucracies. Diffie is a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems and the inventor of public-key cryptography (software that encodes a document with one key and deciphers it with another); Landau is a research associate professor in the department of computer science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Together, they bring formidable expertise to bear on complex topics. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Respected cryptographer Diffie and noted computer scientist Landau here examine a range of telecommunication issues ranging from individual privacy to national security. They begin with a chapter on the basics of cryptography, a system of writing messages in secured form using codes and ciphers and then move on to discuss issues of public policy, law enforcement, and civil liberties as they relate to modern communications systems. Following an enlightening discussion on wiretapping practices that describes how messages are intercepted and how agencies use the information they intercept, Diffie and Landau show why intelligence and law-enforcement agencies view cryptography in communications as a threat to their existence. They analyze the sociology of privacy, how it forms the underpinnings of a democratic society, and what happens when it is lost. The authors conclude by arguing that if we are to retain privacy in communicating with each other, we must build the means of protecting that privacy into our present communication systems. A call to arms for removing restrictions to such secure communications systems, this is an important and timely work for most libraries.?Joe J. Accardi, Northeastern Illinois Univ. Lib., ChicagoCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Review
"Privacy on the Line. . . should be required reading for any computing student at any level." -- Harold Thimbleby, New Scientist


Book Description
Telecommunication has never been perfectly secure, as a Cold War culture of wiretaps and international spying taught us. Yet many of us still take our privacy for granted, even as we become more reliant than ever on telephones, computer networks, and electronic transactions of all kinds. Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau argue that if we are to retain the privacy that characterized face-to-face relationships in the past, we must build the means of protecting that privacy into our communication systems.

Diffie and Landau strip away the hype surrounding the policy debate to examine the national security, law enforcement, commercial, and civil liberties issues. They discuss the social function of privacy, how it underlies a democratic society, and what happens when it is lost.


Book Info
Author argues that if we are to retain the privacy that characterized face-to-face relationships in the past, we must build the means of protecting that privacy into our communication systems. Discusses the social function of privacy, how it underlies a democratic society, and what happens when it is lost. Softcover. DLC: Wiretapping--U.S.


About the Author
Whitfield Diffie, the inventor of public-key cryptography, is Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, Inc. Susan Landau is Research Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.


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The issue of encryption use by private citizens was pushed into the public eye after Phil Zimmerman was placed under threat of indictment resulting from the release of Pretty Good Privacy(PGP). The indictment threat was withdrawn and the public stopped paying much attention to it. It was replaced by the threat of the Computer Decency Act (CDA) as the focus of attention. Now that threat has been pushed back, so the focus seems to be somewhat diffused. The underlying problem has not received the attention it deserves. These two events (and a few others) are merely instances of the most serious threat to the American way of life since the Civil War. The threat is to our right to privacy in our communications with one another. The right to privacy is not mentioned explicitly in the Constitution, but it falls within the penumbra (shadow) of the rights that are explicit.... — Robert Bruen


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