In this case, there’s an antidote: cryptography, the use of codes and ciphers to protect information. If you scramble information before it’s dispatched, eavesdroppers can’t hear what you say or read what you’ve written (unless they take pains to crack your code). The good news is that, after decades of struggle against a government opposed to its widespread use, we’ve finally got access to crypto–software that does the scrambling, as well as other functions like those “digital signatures” that will authenticate that we are who we say we are in cyberspace. You might not see the crypto, but it’s there, going into action every time your browser tells you it’s going into the mysterious “secure mode.” What should alarm you is the degree to which it still isn’t there–in the millions of medical records, credit-card databases and midnight e-mail confessions available to the window-shoppers of cyberspace–and government sniffers. We can attribute that failure to the government’s active opposition, which was largely overcome only a year ago, with the relaxation of export laws limiting privacy technologies.
Don’t think that the Internet economy’s recent turn at playing Icarus will make the questions of crypto less vital. Yes, some of the stocks that created grungy zillionaires are now trading at 5 or 10 percent of their previous stratospheric highs, but there’s just about a 100 percent certainty that the Internet will keep evolving and growing. More and more of the activities once associated with that good old physical world will be performed at our keyboards, on phone devices and palmtops and over digital televisions. Crypto lies at the center of this transition, and we’re going to ask a lot of it over the next few years. Will our e-mail and phone systems ever have strong encryption and digital signatures built in? Can we depend upon crypto to provide foolproof wrappers for songs and movies, so those industries won’t get Napsterized into oblivion? Will feats of crypto really deliver “digital cash” to replace the greenbacks in our wallets with strings of bit-bucks that can be spent in stores, on the Net and beamed to beggars on the street?
Of course, cryptography does not address all the privacy concerns in the digital age. Prince Charles sure would have loved to have had it when his rowdy mobile-phone endearments to Camilla were intercepted by gleeful snoops. But cryptography would not have helped Claire Swire, the unfortunate Brit who e-mailed her lover an ultra racy compliment, only to have the brute circulate it on the Internet, earning her tabloid notoriety and a permanent pedestal in the Mortification Hall of Fame. Nor can it address the legal but infuriating trading of personal information collected from Web sites. To address those privacy violations means regulating the flow of information, a tricky job in an atmosphere where the marketplace usually rules.
The issues in the crypto-battle, the first great war of the digital age, were more straightforward. As people cozied up to digital communications, and e-commerce became a force in the economy, the need for crypto’s near-magical powers of encryption and authentication became red hot. But those at the helm of the government focused not on the benefits, but the dangers–the fear that terrorists, drug dealers and child pornographers would avail themselves of this digital shield. Ultimately, the question boiled down to this: in an attempt to deny a malevolent few, were we all to be deprived of the tools of privacy?
On one side of the battle were relative nobodies: computer hackers, academics and wonky civil libertarians. On the other were some of the most powerful people in the world: spies, generals and even presidents. Guess who won.
