Privacy on the line : the politics of wiretapping and encryption /

Cryptography might seem to be a subject of remote interest or relevance to the general public. But as face-to-face encounters are displaced by electronic means of personal and commercial interaction, cryptography has rapidly emerged as the key focus of policy debates that will shape the future of privacy. The authors write clearly and knowledgeably about public key encryption, evolving legal standards, and policy practice governing the use of eavesdropping technology, the implications of such developments for protecting national security and law enforcement interests, and the nature of the stakes raised by government efforts to use key escrow and export controls to combat criminal uses of secrecy. Though their arguments for unfettered access to high-grade encryption are largely familiar, the clarity, integrated coherence, and the authority of their presentation (Diffie coinvented public key encryption) distinguishes this volume from other treatments, such as the essays collected by Philip E. Agre and Marc Rotenberg, Technology and Privacy (CH, Apr'98). This is a superb and timely introduction to a subject of enormous importance for scholars and citizens alike. Recommended for all levels. A. P. Simonds; University of Massachusetts at Boston

Comsec, sigint, NSA, NIST, DES, Clipper chip, key escrow‘such technobabble related to intelligence-gathering can baffle the uninitiated. This authoritative treatise helps unveil some of the mystery and puts contemporary freedom, privacy and security issues in perspective. After explaining basic concepts of cryptography, the authors cover the history of 20th-century intelligence gathering, then recount the long, discouraging saga of the U.S. government's invasions of its citizens' privacy. In World War II, census data were used illegally to round up Japanese Americans. In the 1950s and '60s, the CIA read private mail, and in the 1970s, it monitored research requests in public libraries. The electronic spying of our security agencies is not even a law-enforcement bargain‘wiretapping is costly and produces arguably modest results. Issues of the 1990s include the 1992 Digital Telephone Proposal, the legal vicissitudes of "Pretty Good Privacy," and the government's attempts to require key escrow (storage of keys so that the government can crack coded messages). As in earlier times, we still see competition between the various security bureaucracies. Diffie is a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems and the inventor of public-key cryptography (software that encodes a document with one key and deciphers it with another); Landau is a research associate professor in the department of computer science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Together, they bring formidable expertise to bear on complex topics. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Respected cryptographer Diffie and noted computer scientist Landau here examine a range of telecommunication issues ranging from individual privacy to national security. They begin with a chapter on the basics of cryptography, a system of writing messages in secured form using codes and ciphers and then move on to discuss issues of public policy, law enforcement, and civil liberties as they relate to modern communications systems. Following an enlightening discussion on wiretapping practices that describes how messages are intercepted and how agencies use the information they intercept, Diffie and Landau show why intelligence and law-enforcement agencies view cryptography in communications as a threat to their existence. They analyze the sociology of privacy, how it forms the underpinnings of a democratic society, and what happens when it is lost. The authors conclude by arguing that if we are to retain privacy in communicating with each other, we must build the means of protecting that privacy into our present communication systems. A call to arms for removing restrictions to such secure communications systems, this is an important and timely work for most libraries.‘Joe J. Accardi, Northeastern Illinois Univ. Lib., Chicago (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.