Replies

They purposely lied in their article.

Yes, they did.

Attorney General Janet Reno (1994)

announcement that NIST and the Department of the Treasury would be the key escrow holders . Reno also released the procedures for release of the keys to law enforcement officials for under Title III, state and national security wiretap orders.

AND, a Freeper posted article from 2000, here.

ARTICLE BELOW AS POSTED:

Al Gore wants to be Big Brother. Since taking office in 1993, Vice President Al Gore has spearheaded a project designed to monitor America. Gore's leadership in this scheme to bug American telephones is too well documented for him to deny.

One such document released by the Justice Department is a March 1993 memo from Stephen Colgate, assistant attorney general for the administration, to Webster Hubbell. In 1993, Hubbell, a former Rose office law partner of Hillary Clinton, served as the No. 2 at the Justice Department.

Colgate's 1993 memo to Hubbell provides the details of the Gore plan. According to the Colgate memo, the vice president chaired a meeting with Hubbell, Reno, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and Leon Panetta in March 1993. The meeting was on the "AT&T Telephone Security Device."

In 1992, AT&T had developed secure telephones that the U.S. government could not tap. In response, AT&T was secretly paid by the Clinton administration to keep the secure phones out of the American market. According to Colgate's memo, the secure phones were simply too dangerous for American citizens.

"AT&T has developed a Data Encryption Standard (DES) product for use on telephones to provide security for sensitive conversations. The FBI, NSA and NSC want to purchase the first production run of these devices to prevent their proliferation. They are difficult to decipher and are a deterrent to wiretaps," Assistant Attorney General Colgate wrote to Webster Hubbell.

In 1993, Webster Hubbell was personally tasked to run the project by both Gore and Janet Reno. Hubbell arranged for the entire production run of secure AT&T phones to be secretly purchased, using the Justice Department "confiscation" slush fund supplied by the Drug War, in order to keep the purchase off the general books.

Part of the secret project included re-fitting the purchased AT&T phones with a new chip called "Clipper." The National Security Agency developed the Clipper chip at Ft. Meade, Md. This chip contained a secret "exploitable" feature allowing the government to tap phone conversation with a special backdoor key.

The Hubbell files show that in 1994 the Whitewater figure met with Gore, Ron Brown, NSA Director McConnell and White House powerbroker John Podesta. The files show Hubbell met in late January 1994 at "the White House Situation Room" on secret presidential orders such as "PDD-5" and "PRD-27." The 1994 secret meeting included details on the Clipper project and "Podesta Alternative Draft Legislation."

The project also included plans to "mandate" the Clipper chip into all U.S. homes and businesses. According to the March 1993 Colgate memo to Hubbell, "FBI, NSA and NSC want to push legislation which would require all government agencies and eventually everyone in the U.S. to use a new public-key based cryptography method."

According to a 1993 FBI memo to then Clinton national security advisor George Tenet, "technical solutions, such as they are, will only work if they are incorporated into all encryption products. To ensure that this occurs, legislation mandating the use of Government approved encryption products or adherence to Government encryption criteria is required."

As part of the Gore plan, the Federal government was required to buy the Clipper chip in large quantities, making it the de facto standard. Even the Defense Department was forced to implement Gore's Clipper project by purchasing a "smart card" or Clipper equipped electronic card called "FORTEZZA." The Gore plan was for the U.S. military to use the FORTEZZA card to protect "sensitive but unclassified information."

The Clipper chip with its "exploitable feature" also had many flaws, including an Achilles heel. In 1993, Benita Cooper, NASA associate administrator for Management Systems and Facilities, documented the fatal flaw in Gore's great computer-security idea.

"The (Clipper) Chip programmer is a device provided by the National Security Agency. There is no assurance, without scrutiny, that all keying material introduced during the chip programming is not already available to the NSA. Thus, not only do the escrow key agents have a decryption capability, the NSA also retains this capability," wrote Ms. Cooper in her rejection of the Clipper chip for NASA.

"Compromise of the NSA keys, such as in the Walker case, could compromise the entire EES (Escrowed Encryption Standard) system," concluded Ms. Cooper.

In response to the discovery, government agencies and computer engineers were silenced by the administration. Cooper's memo was not publicly released until the administration was forced by legal action from this reporter.

Nonetheless, word leaked out. In 1994, Gore struggled with a reluctant Congress and argued for the doomed Clipper project.

According to a July 1994 letter from Gore to Representative Maria Cantwell, "Key escrow encryption offers a very effective way to accomplish our mutual goals. That is why the Administration adopted the key escrow encryption standard in the 'Clipper Chip' to provide very secure encryption for telephone communications while preserving the ability for law enforcement and national security."

Gore also lied to save the sinking Clipper project. According to Cooper, the NSA could read any Clipper chip whether it was legal to do so or not. Recalling her words, "Not only do the escrow key agents have a decryption capability, the NSA also retains this capability."

However, Gore's July 1994 letter to Representative Cantwell makes no mention of the NSA's super powers.

"We also want to assure users of key escrow encryption products that they will not be subject to unauthorized electronic surveillance. As we have done with the Clipper Chip, future key escrow schemes must contain safeguards to provide for key disclosures only under legal authorization and should have audit procedures to ensure the integrity of the system," wrote Gore.

Gore wasted years and millions of tax dollars on the flawed Clipper project. The Justice Department and the Defense Department eventually abandoned the expensive chips. Gore, however, did not give up. Gore's stewardship of U.S. computer security led him to announce yet another scheme to give the government power to monitor all communications.

A recently released Department of Defense memo shows just how much Al Gore wanted to be Big Brother. Gore's son-of-Clipper was called "key recovery." Just as before, it was rammed down the throat of everyone, including the Defense Department.

According to a March 10, 1997, memo from Deputy Secretary of Defense John White to Attorney General Janet Reno, "On October 1, 1996, the Vice President announced Administration support of key recovery mechanism as an essential element of the National Encryption Policy."

"Accordingly," wrote White. "We will transition the FORTEZZA card to a key management infrastructure-based key recovery scheme. Procedures for access to private key exchange keys for properly authorized law enforcement purposes are being developed. ... We understand this interim approach will not fully meet the key recovery criteria being developed by the Interagency Working Group."

Thus, the military dumped the Clipper chip in favor of Gore's new scheme, allowing the government to recover keys and monitor communications. Today, Gore's "key recovery" scheme has collapsed into oblivion.

Al Gore tried twice and failed to invade your privacy in an operation that seems more fitting for a totalitarian government. The topper to this story is that the technical information was also shared with communist China, a totalitarian government.

Chinese army computer engineers from the Beijing Academy of Sciences and the Laboratory of Information Security were given access to key-recovery communications designs. Thus, the Gore plan gave the repressive communist regime the technology to monitor its citizens and hold them in electronic chains forever.

Will the Red Chinese benefit from the Gore-sponsored technical exchange?

"Absolutely," stated Admiral McConnell, former Director of the National Security Agency under both President Bush and President Clinton.

"Even if the Chinese use weak encryption, the sheer volume of their communications will make it impossible for us to monitor. If China were to erect a public key infra-structure it will severely impact our intelligence gathering ability," said McConnell in a rare interview.

The current result of this electronic fistfight over personal privacy is the stalemate that still exists today, seven years after Al Gore took over. It was only due to the vigilant action of a few independent computer scientists and privacy advocates that Gore's Clipper chip and key recovery plans failed here in the United States. The same cannot be said for Red China.

Al Gore has laid claim to many things. He claimed to have invented the Internet. He claimed that a book, "Love Story," was based on his life and the romancing of second lady Tipper Gore. One thing, however, that Al Gore will not claim is his plan to tap every phone in the United States.

SOURCE DOCUMENTS (next post in thread).