France doesn’t have a Bill of Rights to violate, which it seems to me that restriction of cryptography in America would do on several counts.
Predictor: Barlow, John Perry
Prediction, in context:In an “Electronic Frontier” column he wrote for Communications of the ACM [Association for Computing Machinery] in 1993, John Perry Barlow comments on the possibility of the government enforcing newly developed policies regarding Digital Telephony, which would allow the government to “tap” into communications on the Internet, possibly intercepting private citizens’ conversations: ”If I were going to move the American people into a condition where they might accept restrictions on their encryption, I would first engineer the wide-spread deployment of a key escrow system on a voluntary basis, wait for some blind sheik to slip a bomb plot around it and then say, ‘Sorry, folks, this ain’t enough, it’s got to be universal.’ Otherwise, why bother? Even its most ardent proponents admit that no intelligent criminal would trust his communications to a key escrow device. On the other hand, if nearly all encrypted traffic were Skipjack-flavored, any transmission encoded by some other algorithm would stick out like a licorice dot … Then there was the conversation I had with a highly-placed official of the National Security Council in which he mused that the French had, after all, outlawed the private use of cryptography, so it weren’t as though it couldn’t be done … Be that as it may, France doesn’t have a Bill of Rights to violate, which it seems to me that restriction of cryptography in America would do on several counts.”
Biography:John Perry Barlow helped found the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1990 with WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) members Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore in direct response to a threat to free speech. Barlow’s was one of the loudest voices in the battle to keep the Internet unfettered while still encouraging that it become a tool available to everyone. (Advocate/Voice of the People.)
Date of prediction: October 1, 1993
Topic of prediction: Communication
Subtopic: Security/Encryption
Name of publication: Communications of the ACM
Title, headline, chapter name: A Plain Text on Crypto Policy
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
www.eff.org/Publications/John_Barlow_/HTML/plain_text_on_crypto.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney