Dark Territory by Fred Kaplan Read Free Book Online Page A

monitored, in massive volume at its peak, had moved to underground cables or cyberspace.)
    In the fall of 1994, McConnell saw a demonstration, in his office, of the Netscape Matrix—one of the first commercial computer network browsers. He thought, “This is going to change the world.” Everyone was going to have access to the Net—not just allied and rival governments, but individuals, including terrorists. (The first World Trade Center bombing had taken place the year before; terrorism, seen as a nuisance during the nuclear arms race and the Cold War, was emerging as a major threat.) With the rise of the Internet came commercial encryption, to keep network communications at least somewhat secure. Code-making was no longer the exclusive province of the NSA and its counterparts; everyone was doing it, including private firms in Silicon Valley and along Route 128 near Boston, which were approaching the agency’s technical prowess. McConnell feared that the NSA would lose its unique luster—its ability to tap into communications affecting national security.
    He was also coming to realize that the agency was ill equipped to seize the coming changes. A young man named Christopher Mellon, on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s staff, kept coming around, asking questions. Mellon had heard the briefings on Fort Meade’s adaptations to the new digital world; but when he came to headquarters and examined the books, he discovered that, of the agency’s $4 billion budget, just $2 million was earmarked for programsto penetrate communications on the Internet. Mellon asked to see the personnel assigned to this program; he was taken to a remote corner of the main floor, where a couple dozen techies—out of a workforce numbered in the tens of thousands—were fiddling with computers.
    McConnell hadn’t known just how skimpy these efforts were, and he assured the Senate committee that he would beef up the programs as a top priority. But he was diverted by what he saw as a more urgent problem—the rise of commercial voice encryption, which would soon make it very difficult for the NSA (and the FBI) to tap phone conversations. McConnell’s staff devised what they saw as a solution to the problem—the Clipper Chip, an encryption key that they billed as perfectly secure. The idea was to install the chip in every telecommunications device. The government could tap in and listen to a phone conversation, only if it followed an elaborate, two-key procedure. An agent would have to go to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, as the National Bureau of Standards was now called, to get one of the crypto-keys, stored on a floppy disk; another agent would go to the Treasury Department to get the other key; then the two agents would go to the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, to insert both disks into a computer, which would unlock the encryption.
    McConnell pushed hard for the Clipper Chip—he made it his top priority—but it was doomed from the start. First, it was expensive: a phone with a Clipper Chip installed would cost more than a thousand dollars. Second, the two-key procedure was baroque. (Dorothy Denning, one of the country’s top cryptologists, took part in a simulated exercise. She obtained the key from Treasury, but after driving out to Quantico, learned that the person from NIST had picked up the wrong key. They couldn’t unlock the encryption.) Finally, there was the biggest obstacle: very few people trusted the Clipper Chip, because very few people trusted the intelligence agencies. Therevelations of CIA and NSA domestic surveillance, unleashed by Senator Frank Church’s committee in the mid-1970s, were still a fresh memory. Nearly everyone—even those who weren’t inclined to distrust spy agencies—suspected that the NSA had programmed the Clipper Chip with a secret back door that its agents could open, then listen to phone