Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 16:40:11 -0400
To: Matthew Gaylor <freematt@coil.com>
From: Matthew Gaylor <freematt@coil.com>
Subject: Matt Blaze's Thought and Fears
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"

From: David Farber <dave@farber.net>
Subject: IP: Thoughts and fears

Matt [Blaze] is a world class technologist involved in networking and 
cryptography and among many other things was involved with me in the 
AdHoc group that evaluated the DOJ evaluation of Carnivore.

Dave

To: farber@cis.upenn.edu
Subject: Thoughts and fears
Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2001 23:35:38 -0400
From: Matt Blaze <mab@crypto.com>

I find myself overwhelmed by emotion.

I'm a native New Yorker - I was born here and have lived here almost
continuously all my life.  I love this city as much as a person can
possibly love a place; the loss of the World Trade Center and the
literally countless lives taken by this senseless and cruel attack
feels intensely personal.  Yes, I'm angry - part of me is consumed by
a visceral, irrational rage that makes me thirst for terrible
vengeance to be brought upon the murderers responsible for this
outrage.  Mostly though, what I feel can only be described as
revulsion.  When I first saw the video of the Trade Center towers
collapsing I became physically ill.  I what I really want is simply
for this never to have happened - or at least to ensure that it never
be allowed to happen again.  Whatever the cost.

This, far more than the awful prospect of further terrorist attack, is
what scares me.  My fear is that the terrorists will prove to have
already won.  Not by destroying our buildings, but by scarring us into
abandoning the values that give our society its greatness.

Over the weeks and months to come, people of good will, leaders who
truly believe they have our best interests at heart, will be looking
for ways to make it impossible for this to happen again.  The
temptation to trade away our freedoms will be irresistible, the
pressure to take decisive action, whatever its effect on liberty and
privacy, overwhelming.

My own experience with this, in the calmer times before yesterday, was
focused on the debate over cryptography.  I believed then, and
continue to believe now, that the benefits, to our security and
freedom, of widely available cryptography far, far outweigh the
inevitable damage that comes from its use by criminals and terrorists.
I believed, and continue to believe, that the arguments against widely
available cryptography, while certainly advanced by people of good
will, did not hold up against the cold light of reason and were
inconsistent with the most basic American values.  The debate took
years, and was painful at times for all of us on both sides of it, but
was, in retrospect, a sign of our democracy's good health.  We did not
resolve the cryptography debate emotionally or in secret, but rather
through a political and legal process weighted heavily to favor the
protection of individual rights.

Our collective resolve to maintain the freedom, openness and diversity
that so enriches and defines our society will soon be put to its
greatest test in generations.  Compelling reasons will be offered for
curtailments and restrictions on our ability to travel freely and
spontaneously, to keep private matters confidential, and to speak and
conduct business anonymously.  Pressure will be brought on the
designers of computing and communication infrastructure to include
surveillance capability as primary design criteria, alongside
efficiency and performance.

As a technologist involved in networking I have a special respect for
the awesome and subtle power of architecture.  I worry about the
robustness of systems designed with back doors, the potential for
failure in centrally controlled and managed networks, the weakening of
the end-to-end model that made the Internet such a natural success.
My worries take on a special gravity when I consider how pervasively
connected our communication architecture has become to the fabric of
our democracy.  Like it or not computers and networks, as much as our
Constitution, are now endowed with the power to either protect us from
or make us more vulnerable to evils like unreasonable search and
censorship.

I fear that we will be seduced into accepting what seem at first blush
as nothing more than reasonable inconveniences, small prices to pay
for reducing the risk that terrorism happens on our soil again,
without assessing fully the hidden costs to our values and to the
robustness of our society.  Worse, I fear that we may allow these
things to simply happen, without the debate and exposure that an
informed open society would and must demand.

I'm not suggesting for a moment that we ignore the threat of terrorism
or fail to defend ourselves against an increasingly sophisticated and
obviously determined enemy.  But we will have decisions to make about
the direction we want and expect our society to take, and we must not
make them lightly or passively.  Now would not be a bad time for all
Americans to re-read the Bill of Rights and to reflect on the power
and wisdom of the hard choices that maintaining these rights forces us
to make.  We are not, it is abundantly clear, a society built on
expediency.

Many commentators, in the media and elsewhere, have observed that
September 11th will be remembered as the day that everything changed
in America.  Yes, everything changed yesterday, but we needn't allow
it to change us.

Matt Blaze
New York, 12 September 2001


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