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.8 Information obtained by the government for use in one venue has oftenbeen used in another.Census data were used to locate Japanese-Americans so they could be internedduring World War II.Some "national-security" wiretaps under various presidents were actuallyinvestigations aimed at domestic politics.9The government's record of privacy violations means that any broadening of its snooping powers mustbe viewed with the gravest concern.CALEA is the basis for a vast expansion of governmentsurveillance powers.As even the government will admit, its efforts have succeeded in slowing downcryptography's progress and its use in the public sector.Even were the government's record of using itspowers not strewn with tales of abuse, there would be reason to worry.Intentions can change far more quickly than capabilities.Today the authority of most governmentofficials to use wiretaps is tightly regulated by law.Laws, however, can change.Were Congress todecide that wiretaps should be usable by any police department without court supervision much asthe police are free to employ stool pigeons without court supervision the situation could changeovernight.The capacity of the telephone system to support wiretaps, by contrast, would not.Although the present-day phone system is quite capable of supporting the 1500 or so wiretaps thatnow occur each year, it would not be capable of supporting 10 or 100 times as many.But if the FBIhas its way, in a decade or two, after the impact of CALEA has been felt, this may no longer be thecase.The way will have been paved for a vast expansion in government surveillance, and only an actof Congress will be required to bring it about.The push to expand the interception of communications comes at a time when police haveexperienced an unprecedented expansion of their powers of surveillance in almost every area.Advances in electronics permit subminiature bugs that are hard to detect electronically or physically.Video cameras watch streets, shops, subways, and public buildings.Vast databases keep tabs on thecredit, the possessions, and the criminal records of most of the population.Many of these facilitiesplay far greater roles in criminal investigations than wiretaps, and any loss of investigative power thatresults from changes in communications technology seems minuscule in comparison.The Government's CaseThroughout its history, the National Security Agency has sought to prevent the development ofcryptography in the public world.In the 1960s, NSA tried to prevent the publication of David Kahn'spopular book The Codebreakers (Bamford 1982, pp.125-126).In the 1970s, its director, Bobby RayInman, threatened the academic community with prior restraint.In the early 1980s, it tried to haltother government funding of academic research in cryptography, and it also tried to prevent thepublication of James Bamford's history of NSA, The Puzzle Palace.In the mid 1980s it succeeding ingetting the Reagan administration to promulgate NSDD-145, a directive that sought to expand NSA'sauthority to include control over the technology for handling "sensitive but unclassified information." The NSDD-145 effort backfired, and instead increased responsibility for computer security standards(including those for civilian cryptography) being given to the National Institute of Standards andTechnology.Unfortunately, the Computer Security Act of 1987, which conferred this responsibilityon NIST, was not accompanied by sufficient funding to enable NIST to do the job.The NSA, whichhad vastly greater resources, forced NIST into a Memorandum of Understanding that shackledNIST's attempt to develop its own cryptography standardization program.The dismal record of theDigital Signature Standard is one example.The Clipper episode, an even more striking example ofthe misuse of the standards process to further NSA's aims rather than the goals of the law, resulted inthe demise of the AT&T TSD 3600, the first mass-market telephone-security device.For over adecade, cryptography policy in the Commerce Department has been dictated by NSA.10Despite its apparent ability to control NIST, NSA has acted like an agency under fire ever since thepassage of the Computer Security Act
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