One of the things that frightens me about this Clipper sort of thing is that if it’s accepted, society can have far more influence over people by governing what technology is available to them than it can by making laws about what they do and punishing them if they don’t obey the laws.
Predictor: Diffie, Whitfield
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 article for Wired magazine, Steven Levy, an expert technology reporter, interviews Whitfield Diffie, the inventor of public-key cryptography. He responds to the controversy over the U.S. government’s proposed “Clipper” encryption chip, which would allow government agencies to gain access to citizens’ private data. Levy writes: ”[Diffie says] ‘Personal privacy certainly seems to me as important as ever, maybe more so. I’m firmly convinced that human freedom can’t stand in the long run against improving communications technology, that that will utterly destroy the independence of people.’ As it stands, he says, ‘right now people lack freedom in a way that they had it a century or two ago.’ How is this? Diffie explains that in the days of the Founding Fathers, there was no technological surveillance – when two people had a conversation, they communicated with confidence that no one was secretly recording their words. But with every advance in communications technology – telegraph, telephone, fax machine, computer networking, ATM machine, e-mail – more and more information that was once transmitted securely became drawn into these relatively insecure channels. And future advances will continue this trend. Thus, Diffie argues, even if the government permits us the use of strong crypto, law enforcement and intelligence agencies will thrive on a continual bonanza of new technologies that will expose our secrets. The least we can have is some crypto to protect ourselves. ‘Basically,’ Diffie says, ‘one of the things that frightens me about this Clipper sort of thing is that if it’s accepted, society can have far more influence over people by governing what technology is available to them than it can by making laws about what they do and punishing them if they don’t obey the laws.'”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Communication
Subtopic: Security/Encryption
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Prophet of Privacy: Whitfield Diffie Took Cryptography Out of the Hands of the Spooks and Made Privacy Possibly in the Digital Age – By Inventing the Most Revolutionary Concept in Encryption Since the Renaissance
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.11/diffie_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney