Using the U.S. postal service is an act of faith these days. Let that letter drop from your fingertips into the black void of a Chicago mailbox and you’d better believe in some higher authority than the courier in that angular little truck. When it absolutely, positively has to be there in 100 microseconds, through rain or sleet or snow, E-mail is your best bet. But how secure is it? To the post office’s credit, your letters are relatively private. Tampering with the mail is a felony, and the feds have to show probable cause before they can start steaming open even your junk mail. Not so on the Internet. Log in to any of the major nodes, situated like airline hubs around the world, and you can read people’s messages. You can set up a little electronic drug-sniffing dog that will instantly get you copies of all mail containing incriminating phrases like “10,000 kilos of cocaine” or “spanking Clinton.” The possibilities are endless. Security is of obvious concern to vitamin-D-deprived ‘net geeks who kill a lot of time posting to alt.barney.beastiality and downloading digitized pornography from Sweden. But when interactive television, telephones, and computer lines merge onto one superhighway, electronic security will become everyone’s concern. Widespread monitoring of telephone conversations, what movies you watch, what bulletin boards you read, who you E-mail, even where you are on your cellular phone could become automated and easy. It would only take a computer with enough disk space to turn the Internet into an enormous surveillance system. Currently the Internet is as insecure as it is unregulated, but salvation may be at hand. It goes by the name of encryption.
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While PGP has drawn widespread praise on the ‘net, it has also drawn the rather unfriendly attention of–and some pretty hefty criminal investigations by–the FBI and the National Security Agency. Right now PGP–which Zimmerman describes as merely the electronic equivalent of putting a letter in an envelope instead of sending a postcard–is legal, though the NSA claims it’s a threat to national security. The name “Pretty Good Privacy” is a bit of an understatement–it could take a computer 1,000 years to decode a PGP-encrypted message. The thought of waiting that long to get a wiretap has the FBI anxious, and brandishing a good deal of Orwellian legislation. These bills, themselves encrypted in “legalese,” are clearly intended to extend the arms of the law, even if, some would say, it means strangling your right to privacy and free speech.
Traditional encryption worked with what is called a “single key”–for instance, replacing every letter with the one that occurs three later in the alphabet (Caesar, distrusting his messengers, reportedly used this key). This key, or code, both encrypted and decrypted a message, and the fact that it did both was also the Achilles heel of these systems; before use, the key had to be transmitted over a secure channel from one party to the other. Put the codebook in a self-destructing briefcase, handcuff it to Maxwell Smart, and send him off. With the code delivered, both parties could communicate over an insecure channel like the airwaves. Interception of the codebook, however, meant a complete loss of security; anyone with the book could instantly descramble a communication. This was the situation in World War II, and it’s as obsolete as the rotary phone.
Now while it’s probably true that no one cares about your silly E-mail musings to your college friends in California, subverting the government is always good for the soul, and you never know when you might run for office. Besides, you can pick up PGP for free on the ‘net, from numerous FTP sites and bulletin boards. It’s available for Macintosh, MS-DOS, Amiga, Unix, and VMS. Find a coconspirator to try it out with you. I picked up a copy for my Mac from soda.berkeley.edu/pub/cypherpunks/pgp. It comes with a text file explaining how to use it; read it while you’re downloading the PGP program itself, which will take about 15 minutes on a slow modem. If you’ve downloaded stuff before, you know the routine; you’ll have to uncompress the file before using it.
