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| Jan. 15 issue — Technology is a sneaky seductress. We eagerly adopt its pleasures, preferring to cope with the drawbacks on the morning after. |
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WHO CAN RESIST innovations like mobile phones and networked computers? They put anyone, anywhere, within earshot, and zip information—whether an unabashed declaration of love, a medical chart or a detailed plan for a product rollout—around the globe in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, it’s all too easy for corporate eavesdroppers, nosy neighbors with a nerdy streak or government snoops to snap up those messages and conversations en route to their legitimate recipients. We think we’re whispering, but we’re really broadcasting. | ||||||||
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How They Beat Big Brother In this case, there’s an antidote: cryptography, the use of codes and ciphers to protect information. If you scramble information before it’s dispatched, eavesdroppers can’t hear what you say or read what you’ve written (unless they take pains to crack your code). The good news is that, after decades of struggle against a government opposed to its widespread use, we’ve finally got access to crypto—software that does the scrambling, as well as other functions like those “digital signatures” that will authenticate that we are who we say we are in cyberspace. You might not see the crypto, but it’s there, going into action every time your browser tells you it’s going into the mysterious “secure mode.” What should alarm you is the degree to which it still isn’t there—in the millions of medical records, credit-card databases and midnight e-mail confessions available to the window-shoppers of cyberspace—and government sniffers. We can attribute that failure to the government’s active opposition, which was largely overcome only a year ago, with the relaxation of export laws limiting privacy technologies. |
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Don’t think that
the Internet economy’s recent turn at playing Icarus will make the
questions of crypto less vital. Yes, some of the stocks that created grungy
zillionaires are now trading at 5 or 10 percent of their previous stratospheric
highs, but there’s just about a 100 percent certainty that the Internet
will keep evolving and growing. More and more of the activities once associated
with that good old physical world will be performed at our keyboards, on phone
devices and palmtops and over digital televisions. Crypto lies at the center of
this transition, and we’re going to ask a lot of it over the next few
years. Will our e-mail and phone systems ever have strong encryption and
digital signatures built in? Can we depend upon crypto to provide foolproof
wrappers for songs and movies, so those industries won’t get Napsterized
into oblivion? Will feats of crypto really deliver “digital cash” to
replace the greenbacks in our wallets with strings of bit-bucks that can be
spent in stores, on the Net and beamed to beggars on the street?
Protecting Privacy Of course, cryptography does not address all the privacy concerns in the digital age. Prince Charles sure would have loved to have had it when his rowdy mobile-phone endearments to Camilla were intercepted by gleeful snoops. But cryptography would not have helped Claire Swire, the unfortunate Brit who e-mailed her lover an ultra racy compliment, only to have the brute circulate it on the Internet, earning her tabloid notoriety and a permanent pedestal in the Mortification Hall of Fame. Nor can it address the legal but infuriating trading of personal information collected from Web sites. To address those privacy violations means regulating the flow of information, a tricky job in an atmosphere where the marketplace usually rules.
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