Clipper Chick

Changing sides in the government's war against piracy, Dorothy Denning went from hacker hero to one of the most hated people on the Net.
Dorothy Denning points to a white plastic box, about the size of a trade paperback book, next to the telephone in her office at Georgetown University. "By the way," she says "that's a Clipper device." As she nods toward the item, Denning's face - a warm physiognomy that would fit the sort of church lady who never rapped a knuckle in her life - breaks into a characteristic smile: tentative, but welcoming. The smile acknowledges the joke, a joke on herself, really. I ask her when she last used the device, which allows her to speak with similarly equipped callers in total, unequivocal, uncrackable privacy - unless, of course, a legally authorized government wiretapper is eavesdropping. "Once in a while," she answers. "I must confess I haven't used it in a long time."
"When?"
She can't remember.
"Three months ago? Six months?"
"Oh, it could be a year. Part of the reason I have it here is so that, you know, it's a good conversation piece."
Not that I needed that slab of high tech to nudge Clipper into the conversation. By 1993 Dorothy Denning had earned a fine reputation in the field of computer security and cryptography, but the introduction that year of the Clipper Chip brought her a measure of fame that catapulted her beyond her perch in academia to a controversial and powerful role in the continuing debate about the regulation of cryptography in this country - and indeed the world. (Clipper, of course, was the government's proposed solution to its projected inability to conduct legal surveillance in an encrypted digital world.) For defending the government's position and having the nerve to insist that she was duty-bound as a citizen to do so, Denning has been reviled. On the Net, she has been the subject of ridicule on countless newsgroups and listservs, enduring vicious - often sexist - personal insults for simply expressing her opinions on matters crypto. She has been booed and hissed in public appearances. Fellow academics and former colleagues whisper that she has abandoned scholarly distance and hopped into bed with the government. When pressed for a memorable example of vilification, Denning herself recalls, with a mix of bemusement and horror, one of the milder epithets: Clipper Chick. Of course, her critics don't repeat such slurs to her face. Who could? She is 51 years old, meticulously polite, and she weighs about as much as one of George Foster's arms. (Bruce Sterling once described her as "something like a Pilgrim maiden behind leaded glass; if she were 6 inches high, Dorothy Denning would look great inside a china cabinet.") Yet the rage she generates in some of the foes of government crypto policy is a better indication of her real strength and of the considerable effect her lone voice has had in the debate over how - or whether - cryptography should be regulated. Indeed, no single person, within or without the government, has been as fierce an advocate of the Clinton administration's crypto policy as Dorothy Denning. When White House officials do take the podium in defense of Clipper and its progeny, they usually make it clear that they would be happier discussing other less contentious subjects. Most often, they require that you do not quote them for attribution. For them, defending crypto policy is like having dental surgery. By contrast, Denning has a passion for expounding the arguments for a system whereby so-called key escrow backdoors preserve government access to encrypted messages. And Denning is willing to swing the weight of her reputation behind it - which adds exponentially to her arguments. After all, she doesn't have to do this. As the years go by, the subject gains more attention, almost all of it directed at attacking the government's case, which has evolved from Clipper itself into a number of increasingly complicated schemes all embodying the essence of Clipper: government access to the keys that ensure the secrecy. Yet Denning persists, in perpetual sync with the administration's position, chairing panels, churning out papers, writing Op-Ed pieces, zinging the opposition in cyberspace missives. As you might expect, Dorothy Denning is very popular in government circles. Mike Nelson, until recently the administration's point person on the subject, is extremely high on her. So is Clint Brooks, the National Security Agency's architect of Clipper. And when FBI director Louis Freeh spoke last September at a conference Denning chaired on international crypto policy, he broke from his jeremiad on kiddie pornographers and Filipino terrorists hiding under the cover of RSA algorithms and thanked Denning "for the tremendous work and support that she has given to the development of education of these issues." Even critics of government policy admit she's the Feds' best weapon. "Dorothy Denning," says Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, "has given a gloss of credibility to proposals that would not otherwise be taken seriously." Why does Dorothy Denning do it? Her opponents sometimes look for a personal explanation, either mercenary or psychological. Denning heatedly denies any sellout; she says she gets no grants from the FBI or NSA. The psychological possibility is intriguing but elusive. There seems to be no Rosebud in her past to easily explain it - none of her friends or family members, for instance, were victims of a kidnapping in which insufficient information led to tragedy. When pressed for any personal connection to the urgency of the key escrow scheme she defends (which hinges on generating an extra key to unlock data, and the government having access to that key), she takes some time to think about it and, after several days, emails a reply. There were times as a college student when she lost the keys to her apartment and the police had to let her in. And just recently, after taking her regular swim on the Georgetown campus, she emerged from the pool to find that she could not open the combination lock on her locker. Inside were her clothes, her money, her ID. She shivered as she contemplated the necessity of venturing outside in 40-degree cold, wearing only a wet bathing suit and a faltering smile, imploring strangers for help. That disaster was averted when a university worker snapped the lock with a bolt cutter, but the incident reinforced her belief in the value of a system that automatically provides a spare key. Not exactly the stuff of spy novels. But there is drama in the story of Dorothy Denning's relentless defense of Clipper, and it comes from the path she has taken to get there. Just a decade ago, Denning was a relatively obscure academic, toiling in the field of computer security while courting no controversy. But six years ago, she suddenly emerged as a semipariah to the security crowd by announcing that instead of demonizing the young hackers who broke into computers, we should try to understand them, work with them, even learn from them. But no sooner had the cyber-liberties crowd begun to embrace this new champion than she jammed a hard right turn, siding strongly with law enforcement and the government point of view - eventually becoming the FBI's favorite prof, cleared to hear top-secret skinny from the NSA. Because of her previous views, each swing of her pendulum was akin to a celebrated defection to an enemy camp. Those sharing her new views were delighted that she finally saw the light and welcomed the status she brought to the cause. Those she left behind felt betrayed and wondered if she'd taken leave of her senses. Yet there is a consistency to Dorothy Denning: at every turn, she does what she feels is right, and the elements that determine her positions are intensely personal. Ultimately, hers is the tale of a woman who quietly yet determinedly succeeds in a world where few women venture - but finds her ultimate success in discovering an unlikely niche where she can finally be herself. It's her husband, Peter Denning, himself a distinguished computer scientist, who underscores the depth of her commitment today. To hear him talk, his wife almost thinks she has been tapped by God to defend crypto policy in spite of the legions aligned against her. "I don't care if I'm alone," he imagines her thinking, "I believe it's my destiny."
Newbie prof Dorothy Elizabeth Robling was born in 1945 ("a great year for French wine," she says) in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Family legend has it that she displayed independence early: her mother recorded in her baby book that when things did not go her way, Dorothy would gather up her toys and go elsewhere. She was the second of three daughters, but the one most disposed to work for her father, who had a business in wholesale building materials, with offices in Grand Rapids and nearby Grayling, Michigan. She started working while in grade school and earned enough for her first bicycle. By her own description, she was industrious, stuffing envelopes with marketing fliers and rubber-stamping the return envelopes. As she reached high school age, she took on more responsibility, doing invoicing and inventory. She had a talent, though not necessarily a love, for math. She knew that she wanted more from her career than to work in Dad's office. Her high school adviser, evaluating her proclivities, suggested she might look into computer work and described what that might be like. "I said No way," she recalls, displaying what her husband would later refer to as "an iron will." Instead, she headed off to the University of Michigan, on scholarship, so she could train to become a teacher of high school math. She arrived at Ann Arbor in 1963 and stayed there through 1969, ultimately earning her master's. It was a liberating time, and certainly a political one. Dorothy, in a small way, participated, working on Eugene McCarthy's antiwar presidential campaign. But she was never sympathetic to the radical politics of the time. She not only was appalled at the idea of bombing school buildings for peace, but repelled by the inconsiderate tactics of the antiwar movement in general. One of her teachers was literally carried out of the classroom by judgmental antiwar types. "I found it totally uncalled for," she says. In particular, she took offense that the protesters singled out the field of computer science as a symbol of evil. That field, despite her earlier resistance, turned out to be her choice of study. She had come to it serendipitously. During her junior year, her father died, and she stayed on campus that summer to work a secretarial job at the radio astronomy department. When the professor in charge found that she could successfully spin out calculations of Doppler shifts on a Wang desk calculator, he suggested she try programming. The idea that she could concoct a mathematical recipe for two months or so, send it to the computer center, and have it quickly returned with accurate results was amazing. "I got kind of hooked," she says. Programming looked even better after she was sent out for practice teaching - the unruly sixth graders offered a resistance that she would not experience again until many years later in encounters with Clipper-hating cypherpunks. After graduating, she did not enter the teaching profession, but went straight to grad school to learn more about computers. At that time, even more than today, computer science was a field with very few women. Denning claims never to have had a problem working in a field largely dominated by men. "I think it was the training I got working for my father," she says. "There was only one other woman in his company, the secretary - so it was something I grew up with. And math classes are predominantly male, so it was always present. It has never been a problem." When Dorothy completed her master's, in 1969, she was ready to become a systems programmer. She was also newly married to a fellow student named Bill Davis. They moved to Rochester, New York - Dorothy working at the University of Rochester computing center - but within three years the marriage went bust, and she entered a doctoral program at Purdue. The very first semester, she took a course on operating systems. Her project for that class was on computer security, a subject she liked well enough to pursue seriously. She felt the same way about her teacher, a young associate professor with an MIT doctorate who had just arrived at Purdue after a teaching stint at Princeton. His name was Peter Denning. Within two years, they would marry. Computer security in the mid-1970s was a rather abstract field, dealing mostly in theories. The embryonic Internet hooked together only a few sites. Although hacker pranks were common, they were almost all launched from inside the computer centers themselves; in any case, the violations were almost always benign. The computer-security academic priesthood cogitated about access control, password schemes, and the like. Implementation was left to industry; the idea was that corporate security was perfectly attainable by taking the proper safeguards. Government work was in a realm of its own. (Denning wrote her thesis on information flow, but only as she was finishing did she learn how a similar problem - the flow of classified information - was handled by the military.) Dorothy Denning was good at her work, but she kept thinking she might be happier tackling another, more vital, area in computer science - graphics and interface design, where all the mumbo jumbo of the digital infrastructure cuts through to the human mind. At one point, she actually began working on a project called PUNT - "It stood for Program Understanding Tool, something like that," she recalls - in which the idea was to show on the screen what was happening with the program inside the computer at any given point in time. But her grant proposal was turned down. In the late 1970s, however, her work in the security realm suddenly got interesting again. Dorothy Denning was one of the few who correctly divined that a sort of revolution was under way in the world of security: cryptography, a field that for most of this century had been methodically controlled by the government, was suddenly out in the open. She had read the groundbreaking 1976 paper by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman that introduced public key cryptography, but felt a true frisson two years later when encountering the article by Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman that proposed a practical implementation of the concept. She was teaching a computer security course at the time, and she realized that no textbook had yet dealt with these developments. As a smart and ambitious academician, she understood that a rare opportunity was available to her: she could write a book on this emerging field. She had been itching to do a book ever since reading Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (see "By Analogy," Wired 3.11, page 110), which thrilled her so much that she invited the author to Purdue, not only to give a talk but to be guest of honor at an elaborate dinner she planned where every course resonated with Hofstadter's tome. (Throughout, the diners munched on "Dilled Eggbread Denning: The Eternal Golden Braid.") Denning even composed music for the event. "Doug was the inspiration for me to write a book," she says. "Even though mine was nothing like his," she adds, laughing. "She became obsessed with that book," recalls Peter Denning. "It took her one year, start to finish, in addition to her teaching. She would wake up and jump to her terminal, and then stay up late in the night. When she turned the manuscript in to her publisher, she got reviews from people like Diffie, who offered frank criticisms. She was feeling discouraged, but she dug in and followed their suggestions." It paid off: Cryptography and Data Security, published in 1982, would be recognized as a standard text in the field, not to mention a wonderful technical introduction to the art of keeping secrets in the computer age. At the time, there was a hot controversy between the National Security Agency and the academic community: the NSA felt that by openly discussing and publishing various technical aspects of cryptography, mathematicians and computer scientists might be providing powerful knowledge to our enemies. To ensure against this, the NSA suggested that authors submit to prepublication review. The academics, Dorothy Denning among them, did not warm to this concept. She offered the NSA no opportunity to screen secrets. In any case, she says, "The whole time I was writing the book, I never once thought about the fact that cryptography might be a problem someday. It never occurred to me." That was then. If she knew then what she knows now about the case against the spread of strong cryptography, as well as the needs of the NSA, she says, "I would have sent it to them."
Hacker den mother That is the Dorothy Denning who today is the scourge of wireheads everywhere. But only a few years ago, Denning stood miles away from the government perspective, pleading the case for a certain class of lawbreakers. She was, for a brief time, the champion of hackers (though, she emphasizes, not of their illegal activities). It happened, of course, in California. In 1983, Peter Denning was offered a job at NASA's Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science, and his wife accompanied him west, taking a job at Stanford Research Institute, the prestigious think tank and research center known for projects like Doug Engelbart's pioneering interface research. Dorothy continued her work on computer security, but was beginning to harbor doubts about some of the implications. One of her main projects was developing a system for intrusion detection, and she began worrying that implementing such a scheme might violate the privacy of users. Perhaps as a result of this discomfort, she began to yearn for work in what she had always suspected was the more interesting digital frontier: graphics and interface. Finally, in 1987, she got a job in that field at Digital Equipment Corp.'s research center in Palo Alto. To her consternation, she realized she was in over her head. The people there were legendary wizards so steeped in the guts of systems that she found no place in the conversation. The disappointment was tempered by a fortuitous contact. A young hacker going by the nom de keyboard Frank Drake (in reality the same Steve G. Steinberg now found on the masthead of this magazine) knew of her work in security and crypto and wanted to interview her for a hacker zine. The ensuing electronic exchange was an absolute revelation to the studiously professional computer scientist. She was impressed that Drake had actually thought about issues like privacy and responsibility, and that piqued her curiosity. Part of her excitement also came from finally dealing with people in her work. "All my time had been spent on these abstract problems, and I guess at that point I was ready to do something different," she says. That impulse had been fueled by Denning's mind-altering attendance at The Forum, an intense, two-weekend sensitivity workshop designed by Werner Erhard that descended directly from the quasi-religious organization est. The program, she says, was "designed to get you in touch with the beliefs that you had about the world and to see the box that you lived in." In her case, the box was the math-driven theoretical world of computer science. She knew that mathematics had a real effect on society, but as far as her inner feelings were concerned, "the connection between mathematics and society seemed remote." Attending the sessions "woke up the interest I had about society and how my own work influenced society." Whether it was a case of the workshop affecting her behavior or the grown-up equivalent of packing up her toys and going elsewhere, she decided to explore a more humanistic approach to her work. So Dorothy Denning delved into the computer underground. She later turned the tables on Drake and interviewed him, then got a list of others to interview. At first it was anthropology. But as she continued, she began to admire their curiosity and accept their contention that they were just bright kids - really - kids who weren't trying to cause grief. Their misdeeds, she recalls, "didn't seem all that bad." She was smitten, and she admits that part of it could have been a displaced maternal urging. (Denning has no children; "too absorbed in my work," she says.) "I was at the age when those kids could have been mine," she says. "I could have been their mother. I started thinking, 'Gee, if one of these was my kid, he could be going to jail,' and it didn't seem justified." Eventually, she became so involved in that spirit of surrogate motherhood that she took on the role of adviser to the legal team representing Craig Neidorf, a college student facing a prison term for posting a telephone company document in an electronic publication. Her lasting statement was a paper titled "Concerning Hackers Who Break into Computers." She presented it at the 13th National Computer Security Conference in Washington, DC, in October 1990, chairing a panel with Drake (aka Steinberg), Neidorf, and Emmanuel Goldstein (aka Eric Corley), the punkish publisher of 2600, a hands-on guide to phone hacking and social engineering. "I thought the people at this conference should hear what these guys had to say," she says. (There were also some nonhacker types on the panel.) Though it follows the format of an academic article, her paper actually has more in common with some of the digi-goo-goo writings of Howard Rheingold, John Perry Barlow, and, I must admit, my own book Hackers, which is cited as a source. "My initial findings suggest," she writes, as if squinting into some social test tube, "that hackers are learners and explorers who want to help rather than cause damage and who often have very high standards of behavior.... Hackers have raised important issues about values and practices in an information society. Based on my findings, I recommend that we work closely with hackers." The paper caused quite a stir, and some in the security community regarded it with biting criticism. But the remarks that really stopped Denning in her tracks came from her former SRI colleague Donn Parker, the hawkish computer-crime guru, who considered her stance naïve if not dangerously misguided and, worst of all, unprofessional. He suggested that she might think differently if she had ever considered the other side. Now that she had departed from the mathematics and technical theories of security for the murkier grounds of human psychology, why not seek the other side of the story and talk to those who had to fight off the little bit-snatchers? So she did, pursuing the project with the same manic vigor with which she had attacked her book project. It was, yet again, a revelation. One day, she visited the Los Angeles Police Department, where an officer spent hours going through the kinds of cases the LAPD had handled, cases with nasty hackers and real victims. "I saw some of the documents taken off hackers' computers, including worksheets that they used in the cracking process." She saw evidence of outright theft of information, of stolen credit cards with merchandise ordered. "Most of the cases I heard about were ones where there was some monetary action involved," she says. She visited Gail Thackeray, the prosecutor who ran a notorious antihacker investigation called Operation Sun Devil. "There were all these stories about what a witch she was, but she was a very nice person." Then she returned to the San Francisco Bay area to understand the problems the region was suffering with hackers. In each instance, she felt that the people she met were honest and diligent public servants, protecting the world against what they considered a very real threat. She came to conclude that the cases with which she had been most familiar - cases like that of Neidorf, in which the government acted improperly against apparently innocent people - had been anomalies. "Overall, the cases were being handled very professionally," she says. "There was also a lot of concern for the kids that they busted. In fact, in the majority of the cases, they met with the kids and the parents and the whole thing was resolved out of court." After some months of interviewing law enforcement people, Denning came to realize that her own views, as expressed in her hacker paper, were misguided. All that stuff about hackers being thoughtful pioneers of constitutional freedoms was actually, she realized, bullshit. She now has thoroughly recanted her earlier stance. In 1995, she published a postscript to her 1990 paper which, in effect, contends that she totally misinterpreted the hacker scene. She now realizes that the few hackers she had interviewed may have been "learners and explorers," but the vast majority actually were petty thugs, malicious vandals, or, at the very least, misguided trespassers. "I no longer recommend working closely with hackers," she wrote, concluding that "working with people who flagrantly violate the law sends the wrong message and rewards the wrong behavior." Instead she suggests "better security and law enforcement ... so that chances of penetration are reduced while those for detection and prosecution are increased." Dorothy Denning had packed up her toys and moved one more time.
Spooky beltway insider In the midst of this reevaluation, in 1991, Denning went east. Going to DEC had been "the worst career decision in my life," and her anthropological studies of hackers received a poor reception at what, after all, was a research lab. So, when she saw two advertisements in a magazine, one for the computer science department chair at Georgetown and the other for the same position at George Mason University in northern Virginia, she applied for both. Georgetown replied first, and in short order she interviewed and accepted their offer. When George Mason finally contacted her, she told them she was unavailable, but added, "I know just the guy for you." That's how Peter Denning got his job. It was from that Washington, DC, perch that Dorothy Denning would became a policy player. In the early 1990s, the controversy du jour in cyber circles was the government's proposed Digital Telephony Bill, legislation that would require the entire telecommunications network to be wiretap-friendly - even if it cost millions or billions of dollars. Discover magazine asked Denning if she'd be interested in writing about it. "It started out as a neutral, balanced article," she says. But she sat down with the FBI and other security agencies and heard the case from their point of view, and became increasingly convinced that wiretaps were crucial to the ability of law enforcement to protect society. She heard about the planned rocket attack of an airplane being thwarted and learned that without old-fashioned analog wiretaps, that airplane and its passengers might have been dust. Likewise, wiretaps were essential in successfully prosecuting government corruption in a case called Ill Wind. She was particularly impressed that in the fight against organized crime, wiretaps had been the absolutely essential prosecution tool. But all wiretaps were in danger because advanced digital telephone systems would make it harder to install and carry out the taps. All the government wanted, she was told, was to maintain the same ability it currently enjoyed. And while others suspected that the government really wanted the ability to create more taps, at lower cost, with fewer technological hurdles, Dorothy took her government sources at their word. She had come to know and trust them. The Digital Telephony Bill, she concluded, was a fine and important initiative. Though Discover later changed its mind about wanting the article, in March 1993 she did publish a long story for the Communications of the ACM titled, "To Tap or Not to Tap." It was clear that she favored the former. It caused quite a stir, particularly because many knew Dorothy Denning as the computer security specialist who defended hackers. The public defection was seen as significant, and the reaction commensurate. "After a substantial number of conversations with people in law enforcement, I said, 'OK, I'm going to support this.' And everything changed after that." The electronic attacks then began, at first on the sci.crypt newsgroup, and then spreading more widely. Many of the postings were ad hominem, and this bothered her. For a while she saved the postings, but eventually the file got too large to keep. The worst responses were from people she knew: they were often condescending, calling her naïve. "They thought I had been sucked into the government's side of the debate without really understanding it myself and making my own intelligent decision about it," she says. "That digs at your intelligence and your gullibility, so actually those comments hurt more than the others because they came from people I respected." Her stance on Digital Telephony had given her a label: the government's good friend. With the Clipper Chip, she would become its best friend. In April 1993, she got a call from John Markoff of The New York Times, who then was researching the story that would break the news of Clipper. He seemed to know more than she did. According to a declassified National Security Council document, she reported the conversation to the FBI, which passed on to the NSC the information that Markoff "knew what was brewing." Denning confirms the story, saying that she alerted the FBI of Markoff's call in part to inquire about what might be happening but also to warn them that the Times was on the case - a heads up that may well have caused the government to speed up its announcement of Clipper. Denning didn't really learn the details until two days later, when an FBI friend told her the news. The following day, April 16, 1993, Clint Brooks, the NSA's architect of key escrow policy, drove from Maryland in a driving rain to Denning's office at Georgetown to brief her on the workings of the chip. Brooks remembers her as initially being skeptical, but coming around as she learned more about it. Later that day, she attended a Commerce Department briefing and then met with the FBI. "My reaction was very positive," she says. "It was like they really wanted to let the community know how this thing worked." In thinking about the Digital Telephony legislation, she had worried that the whole effort would be wasted if speakers encrypted their phone conversations - in that case, wiretappers would get the taps but wouldn't be able to understand a word. Denning had been musing about approaches to this problem and was delighted that the government was working a step ahead of her. "They had actually worked out something which was better than anything I had thought of," she says, "and it seemed exactly the right thing to do." At the end of that day of briefings, Denning posted a technical description of the telephone-based Clipper scheme on the Net. She also later wrote a piece for American Scientist that attempted to simply explain what Clipper was all about. She meticulously described how the chip's keys were to be stored in government escrow facilities, to be offered only to legal wiretappers. "There were all kinds of misperceptions and misconceptions," she says. Denning was also chosen by the government to be part of a panel of cryptographers who would evaluate the efficacy of the chip, in particular the secret Skipjack algorithm that did the actual encryption. This was very important for the government, because critics seized on the fact that the encryption scheme was designed by the highly secretive NSA, and it was impossible to tell whether the government had stuck in a backdoor that would allow it to break secrets - even without the keys. The panel concluded that the Clipper Chip was secure. This turned out to be somewhat of an embarrassment, since Matt Blaze, an AT&T computer scientist, discovered in May 1994 a flaw that enabled abusers to use the chip in a way that thwarted wiretappers. Denning counters: "It was definitely not in our mandate even to look for that kind of thing. We were really looking to make sure that people's data would be well protected with this - not really looking at whether someone could subvert it." After the panel review, Denning turned from merely describing the chip to outright public advocacy, reflecting the favorable opinion she had held since early in her evaluation. If the abuse from her stance on Digital Telephony was harsh, Dorothy Denning received even more brutal treatment for her defense of Clipper. Typical was the critic who charged that she must have been dropped on her head as an infant. "When she showed me some of the flaming, my blood would boil," says Peter Denning. But she kept on with it, writing an Op-Ed piece for Newsday, publishing journal articles, even debating John Perry Barlow on America Online. The Clipper Chick was going full tilt. Despite the best efforts of Dorothy Denning and the administration, the original Clipper failed. In her estimation, two factors killed it. First, it provided too much to criticize: it had a secret algorithm; it was a hardware chip, not software; and the escrow agencies holding the key were part of the government. Second, there was no market demand for such a telephone system at its US$1,200 price. But the essence of the Clipper idea - providing a government backdoor to encrypted files by way of escrowed keys - survived and even expanded to include computer communications and stored computer data. In September 1995, the government came up with a new proposal, dubbed by critics as Clipper II. The administration contended that businesses would welcome this new version because it provided a fail-safe means of retrieving computer data when keys were lost. There were also concessions: this scheme did not involve a hardware solution, but a software one. The escrow agencies would not necessarily be associated with the government. And if companies used the new key escrow crypto, they could export systems that took advantage of longer keys - the longer the key, the stronger the crypto. Without key escrow, the exported keys must remain only 40 bits long, but with them they could be 64 bits long, increasing security by a multiple of many thousands. As the government fashioned this new approach, Dorothy Denning "was very helpful with constructive suggestions," says Clint Brooks of the NSA. Once again, the marketplace showed no enthusiasm for the proposed changes. So in May 1996, the administration released a draft of a white paper that made further compromises - including provisions for self-escrowing keys. But this third proposal, dubbed by some as Clipper III, was placed in a context of a complicated structure for the management of keys, which, of course, involves government access. Once again, Denning has been defending it. Even though she has not been directly responsible for the twists and turns of policy, she provides the bedrock rationale behind all the schemes, as well as an argument for their necessity. It seems that with the current climate in Congress - where even Bob Dole has sided with crypto-anarchists in charging that the administration's policy does little but cripple our own computer industry - that the political tide is beginning to turn away from the administration. The National Research Council's May 1996 report on cryptography concluded that the government's policy is flawed, that key escrow should be approached cautiously, and that current export controls on crypto should be relaxed (see "Clinton's New Clothes," Wired 4.08, page 80). It was another blow against the administration - particularly since the committee included such establishment types as a former NSA deputy director and a onetime attorney general. Yet Dorothy Denning continues, unbowed.
Destiny This is a battle Denning may not win, but she thinks it's too important to give up. Recently, she became alarmed by an increase in cases where, she was told, investigative agencies have been frustrated by scrambled files and communications. For several days, she called these agencies and received firsthand reports. "These cases," she says, "involved child pornography, customs violations, drugs, espionage, embezzlement, murder, obstruction of justice, tax protesters, and terrorism." In the conference she hosted in September, FBI Director Louis Freeh even spoke of a crypto-packing terrorist organization in the Philippines that's plotting to kill the pope. She thinks that key escrow is destined to be a "third paradigm" of cryptography (after secret key and public key). It could become a standard means of assuring that people can get access to their own materials - as well as, of course, the means by which government can get hold of encrypted information when necessary. Without key escrow, she believes, what some of her opponents lovingly call "crypto anarchy" will indeed rule. "Crypto anarchy can be viewed as the proliferation of cryptography that provides the benefit of confidentiality protection but does nothing about its harms," she explained in a recent paper. "It is like an automobile with no brakes, no seat belts, no pollution controls, no license plate, and no way of getting in after you've locked your keys in the car." If crypto anarchy were unloosed upon the world, she predicts, "social disorder and lawlessness" would thrive and chaos itself might ultimately rule. With those stakes, how can she possibly withhold her comments? How can she allow false information about key escrow to remain unchallenged on the Net? "I have a very strong reaction to things that are false. When I see something that's false, it doesn't matter what it is, I will often respond to it," Denning says. "And so there have been cases where I know I have defended the government because I thought the statements that were being made were not fair. People will say the government is trying to do X, and I say, 'No, based on my conversations with people in the FBI and the NSA, that's not what they're trying to do, they're trying to do Y.'" So what if her critics maintain that it's one thing to attempt to correct truths, but quite another to do so in a partisan matter? What if, because her arguments always seem to favor the government, some of her peers in academia and the professional community maintain (off the record) that she has lost her credibility? "I can see why they would say that, because I find that my own views are very consistent with views of people in the NSA and FBI, and because I will defend them when I think they're being unfairly attacked," she says. "It's true - I do feel inclined to defend the government. I accept that. I accept I'm not neutral on this issue. I have taken a position on this issue and so when you take a stand, you can't look at it as a neutral impartial observer. That's the role I've fallen into."
"Are you comfortable with that role?"
"I don't think about my personal comfort. That's not an issue."
"Well, then you sound like a crusader."
"Well, no. I'm not crusading, either."
"Then you're acting as a conscience?"
Dorothy Denning pauses. "OK, maybe. I just want to make sure that the government point of view gets understood for what it is. And not for what other people say it is." In effect, Dorothy Denning is protecting the government with the same maternal fury that she once exhibited when she rushed to the aid of the hackers. Her motivations are really not about power, money, or even glory. She has made a personal connection with the law enforcers, the bureaucrats, and the spies, and her trust in them has enabled her to evaluate the evidence they present with what she considers a clearer eye than those outside the loop. Armed with what she believes is the truth, she's getting the message out. As a result, she thinks her work does make a difference, does have an impact on society. Her critics may think that she's wrong, that she's pedantic, that she's a stooge for Big Brother. But don't make that argument to Dorothy Denning. She's heard it already, and she's not buying it. Destiny has tapped the Clipper Chick on the shoulder, and she's hellbent on living up to the responsibility.