WEBVTT 00:00:00.440 --> 00:00:06.160 JACK: My grandfather went most of his life without using or needing encryption but now we 00:00:06.160 --> 00:00:12.480 live in a time where encryption is intertwined in almost all of our electronic communications. That 00:00:12.480 --> 00:00:17.760 shift to go from a world where everyday people didn’t use encryption at all to a world where 00:00:17.760 --> 00:00:23.280 everyone uses it and doesn’t even know it was a major transformation and there was nothing easy 00:00:23.280 --> 00:00:29.520 about it. There were powers at play that didn’t want everyday people to encrypt their messages 00:00:29.520 --> 00:00:35.680 but human rights and civil rights activists fought and fought and fought. You know the 00:00:35.680 --> 00:00:41.520 outcome of this story but you may not know what it took for us to get here. Let’s take a journey 00:00:41.520 --> 00:00:49.120 through time back to the 1990s and understand exactly what were to be known as the Crypto Wars. 00:00:49.120 --> 00:00:55.360 JACK (INTRO): [INTRO MUSIC] This is Darknet Diaries, true stories 00:00:55.360 --> 00:01:03.834 from the dark side of the internet. I’m Jack Rhysider. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS] 00:01:03.834 --> 00:01:07.360 JACK: Before we get started, I feel like I should say something. It’s really hard for 00:01:07.360 --> 00:01:12.000 me to stay neutral on this topic because I’m such a privacy and security advocate. 00:01:12.000 --> 00:01:16.800 This is a topic that’s important to me and I’m staunchly on a specific side, 00:01:16.800 --> 00:01:23.680 so upfront I just want to say that I apologize if I don’t represent both sides fairly in this story. 00:01:23.680 --> 00:01:28.200 To help take us through this pivotal piece of history, we have a very special guest. 00:01:28.200 --> 00:01:32.960 CINDY: My name is Cindy Cohn and I’m the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 00:01:32.960 --> 00:01:38.080 JACK: The EFF is a non-profit digital rights group. It helps protect your 00:01:38.080 --> 00:01:43.200 civil liberties online. Cindy has been with the EFF for over twenty years and 00:01:43.200 --> 00:01:47.840 she’s played a crucial part in the Crypto Wars as we’ll soon discover. But before we get into 00:01:47.840 --> 00:01:52.840 her role in it we need to take a quick glimpse into the history of cryptography. 00:01:52.840 --> 00:02:00.080 CINDY: Cryptography has been used by military people to protect their plans and share 00:02:00.080 --> 00:02:05.360 information say, across between the generals and the front lines for as far back as Julius 00:02:05.360 --> 00:02:14.560 Caesar. Caesar had a cypher that they used. In World War II there’s some great stories about 00:02:14.560 --> 00:02:21.360 how the ability to break the German code, the enigma machine which they were using to code had 00:02:21.360 --> 00:02:28.640 a tremendous influence on the ability of the allies to win the war. There’s great stories 00:02:28.640 --> 00:02:36.320 about both the code breakers in Bletchley Park breaking the German code, there were also really 00:02:36.320 --> 00:02:42.960 successful efforts to break the Japanese codes. Lots of people will, I think quite credibly say 00:02:42.960 --> 00:02:51.744 that the allies’ ability to break encryption codes had a lot to do with us actually winning the war. 00:02:51.744 --> 00:02:55.280 JACK: [BEEPING] Encryption is when you take a message and encode it in such a 00:02:55.280 --> 00:02:57.920 way that if someone else were to get that message, 00:02:57.920 --> 00:03:02.160 they would not be able to read it. But then whenever the receiver gets the message, 00:03:02.160 --> 00:03:06.920 they would be able to decode it and read the message. This is also known as cryptography. 00:03:06.920 --> 00:03:15.600 CINDY: The military has always viewed encryption as a part of its tool set, part of what they 00:03:15.600 --> 00:03:25.600 needed to do in order to help us win military wars. The US State Department keeps a list 00:03:25.600 --> 00:03:33.360 called the US Munitions List that has all of the things that the government treats as a military 00:03:33.360 --> 00:03:39.840 tool such that it can’t be exported without a license from the government. The US Munitions 00:03:39.840 --> 00:03:45.760 List is pretty long. It has things that will be – it has tanks and surface-to-air missiles and 00:03:45.760 --> 00:03:52.960 submarines and things like that that you can’t – and military subs, that if you build them 00:03:52.960 --> 00:03:57.840 or a piece of them you need to get a license from the US government before you export it. 00:03:57.840 --> 00:04:02.000 JACK: During the Cold War era, sometime in the 1970s or 80s, 00:04:02.000 --> 00:04:06.560 the US State Department added cryptography to the Munitions List. 00:04:06.560 --> 00:04:10.960 CINDY: It wasn’t particularly important to the rest of us [00:05:00] because the rest of us 00:04:10.960 --> 00:04:19.120 didn’t really need to have strong encryption in what we did every day. [MUSIC] That’s kind of what 00:04:19.120 --> 00:04:28.480 the world looked like heading into the early days of the internet. The shift came as the internet 00:04:28.480 --> 00:04:35.280 was getting to be developed, especially in the early 1990s, just before the World Wide Web but 00:04:35.280 --> 00:04:42.400 when a lot more people were beginning to think about what the world would look like if we had 00:04:42.400 --> 00:04:47.920 everybody in the world connected via digital technology. The realization that we were going 00:04:47.920 --> 00:04:54.320 to need to have privacy and security in this new world and that encryption was 00:04:54.320 --> 00:05:02.800 one of the ways that you could get it was fairly obvious to a lot of early thinkers about this. 00:05:02.800 --> 00:05:06.880 Suddenly this thing that wasn’t particularly relevant to the rest of us, 00:05:06.880 --> 00:05:11.600 the fact that the government controlled encryption technology suddenly became very 00:05:11.600 --> 00:05:21.520 relevant as we started thinking about how to build an internet that would really work for 00:05:21.520 --> 00:05:27.840 every day, ordinary people who wanted to do commerce or have a private conversation or 00:05:27.840 --> 00:05:34.160 use this technology to develop new tools that they might need to protect as trade secrets, 00:05:34.160 --> 00:05:42.640 or keep confidential. Also, keep the network secure. Encryption does both of these things; 00:05:42.640 --> 00:05:49.440 it both keeps things private and it keeps things secure. It emerged as one of the really important 00:05:49.440 --> 00:05:54.880 technologies that we were going to have to have available if we were going to have an 00:05:54.880 --> 00:06:01.280 internet that really worked for everybody. The government created an encryption standard that 00:06:01.280 --> 00:06:08.880 it let people use so that there could at least be some encryption but it was very, very weak. 00:06:08.880 --> 00:06:15.200 JACK: This standard was known as DES and stood for Data Encryption Standard. With 00:06:15.200 --> 00:06:19.440 it you can encrypt your data or a message and anyone who reads the encrypted message 00:06:19.440 --> 00:06:23.680 could not understand what it said. The person receiving the message had a key 00:06:23.680 --> 00:06:28.160 to decrypt the message but by the time the internet was taking shape 00:06:28.160 --> 00:06:33.600 DES had already been around for twenty years and was starting to show its age. 00:06:33.600 --> 00:06:44.880 CINDY: Most cryptographers, most mathematicians knew this for years. By the 90s DES was clearly 00:06:44.880 --> 00:06:51.280 not good security anymore. The government was pretending like it was, and one of the 00:06:51.280 --> 00:06:57.920 – it was kind of one of those situations in which the government policy people wanted 00:06:57.920 --> 00:07:03.120 something to be true, that DES was really secure, because they had back-doored it, 00:07:03.120 --> 00:07:08.800 because they knew that it wasn’t really secure. They could always break it and were pretending 00:07:08.800 --> 00:07:13.520 like it was really secure and hoping that nobody noticed. But of course, people did notice. 00:07:13.520 --> 00:07:17.280 JACK: The government knew 40-bit DES encryption was 00:07:17.280 --> 00:07:20.960 not very strong but insisted we use it anyways. 00:07:20.960 --> 00:07:25.200 CINDY: A guy named Bobby Inman who was the head of the NSA in the 90s, 00:07:25.200 --> 00:07:32.320 but there are other people as well, who were making representations about DES that were I 00:07:32.320 --> 00:07:39.200 think not really true. You have to either think that they knew what they were talking about and 00:07:39.200 --> 00:07:43.920 were basically trying to convince the rest of us that it wasn’t, or that they didn’t 00:07:43.920 --> 00:07:47.840 know what they were talking about, in which case it’s a little troubling because they’re the NSA. 00:07:47.840 --> 00:07:52.240 JACK: Businesses and banks were digitizing their data and the need for all this data 00:07:52.240 --> 00:07:58.309 to be encrypted slowly became more and more important. The early 90s was a place where… 00:07:58.309 --> 00:08:03.200 CINDY: The people are engaging in various kinds of protest activity, political organizing, 00:08:03.200 --> 00:08:07.840 all of that sort of activity. Encryption is tremendously important for people who 00:08:07.840 --> 00:08:11.520 are trying to change the government, who are trying to change corporate polices, 00:08:11.520 --> 00:08:17.200 who are trying to stand up for building a world that is better than the one that 00:08:17.200 --> 00:08:25.760 we have. We know that the US government has traditionally spied on people who 00:08:25.760 --> 00:08:29.040 are engaging in political protests. We know they spied on Martin Luther King, 00:08:29.040 --> 00:08:35.240 we know they spied on John Lennon, we know that they spied on all of the civil rights movement. 00:08:35.240 --> 00:08:39.760 JACK: This is why PGP got started. Phil Zimmermann, a software engineer, 00:08:39.760 --> 00:08:46.400 developed a much more secure way of communicating called PGP which stood for Pretty Good Privacy. He 00:08:46.400 --> 00:08:52.320 helped human rights activists use it. He put his PGP code on a FTP server for anyone to download 00:08:52.320 --> 00:08:58.320 and use. While Phil said he did not spread it outside the US, it eventually found its way to the 00:08:58.320 --> 00:09:05.360 other side of the US borders. Because cryptography was considered a munition, Phil was investigated 00:09:05.360 --> 00:09:13.680 by the US Customs Service for violating the Arms Export [00:10:00] Control Act. This would be the 00:09:13.680 --> 00:09:20.960 same violation if someone were to export stinger missiles outside the US without an Arms Permit. 00:09:20.960 --> 00:09:25.760 Businesses were originally fine with DES as the standard even though they knew stronger 00:09:25.760 --> 00:09:31.840 encryption existed, because in the 80s the only adversary to businesses were other businesses. 00:09:31.840 --> 00:09:37.760 They knew other businesses didn’t have strong crypto analytic capabilities. Even if it was weak, 00:09:37.760 --> 00:09:42.160 nobody had the ability to crack it except for governments but it started to become 00:09:42.160 --> 00:09:47.440 clear that other nations were trying to develop ways to break DES so businesses 00:09:47.440 --> 00:09:52.080 were starting to get a little worried and wanted to use stronger encryption. 00:09:52.080 --> 00:09:56.800 Businesses started using PGP as a form of communicating trade secrets and sensitive 00:09:56.800 --> 00:10:04.240 data. Using PGP internally was legal as long as the encryption didn’t cross the US border. 00:10:04.240 --> 00:10:09.840 For the next few years Phil would be continually investigated for spreading his encryption method 00:10:09.840 --> 00:10:15.040 around the world. A case was brought against him by the government for violating the Arms Export 00:10:15.040 --> 00:10:21.440 Control Act. From what I can tell, the battle between Phil Zimmermann and the US government was 00:10:21.440 --> 00:10:29.440 the first battle of the Crypto Wars. The users of the internet, security companies, and banks 00:10:29.440 --> 00:10:34.320 were all starting to request higher and higher security encryptions to be used by the people. 00:10:34.320 --> 00:10:40.160 CINDY: On the other side was the military and law enforcement saying no, 00:10:40.160 --> 00:10:47.600 we need to keep the encryption weak so we can catch the bad guys. We were pointing out that 00:10:47.600 --> 00:10:54.160 most of us would rather be secure in the first instance and not get robbed than have very 00:10:54.160 --> 00:10:58.280 low security but slightly increase the chance that they might catch the robbers afterwards. 00:10:58.280 --> 00:11:03.680 JACK: In 1993 Bruce Schneier published a book called Applied Cryptography. This book 00:11:03.680 --> 00:11:08.640 describes various cryptographic algorithms and how to use them. It even contains algorithms 00:11:08.640 --> 00:11:13.280 which were not allowed to be used on the internet. An electronic engineer named Phil 00:11:13.280 --> 00:11:19.280 Karn asked US State Department for a commodities jurisdiction for the book. He wanted to know if he 00:11:19.280 --> 00:11:25.120 could legally ship the book across US borders. Since there’s no export regulations on books, 00:11:25.120 --> 00:11:30.400 he was given permission to export the book. Then Phil Karn took a few pages 00:11:30.400 --> 00:11:36.400 from the book which contained some cryptographic algorithms and placed them on a floppy disc. He 00:11:36.400 --> 00:11:40.960 then requested a commodity jurisdiction for the floppy disc. The State Department 00:11:40.960 --> 00:11:46.720 had a discussion with the NSA and denied the request. We know they had a discussion with 00:11:46.720 --> 00:11:51.920 the NSA because of records requested through the Freedom of Information Act years later. 00:11:51.920 --> 00:11:56.960 Because the encryption was in electronic form it was now considered a regulated munition 00:11:56.960 --> 00:12:03.680 and was not allowed to cross US borders in that form. This created quite a controversy. 00:12:03.680 --> 00:12:09.840 A book containing a mathematical algorithm can be sent across the border but a floppy disc with the 00:12:09.840 --> 00:12:16.720 same algorithm cannot? So Phil Karn sued the US State Department. He believed that if the 00:12:16.720 --> 00:12:21.200 data contained in a book was considered protected under the First Amendment, then data contained on 00:12:21.200 --> 00:12:26.560 a floppy disc should also be protected in the same way. Once Phil Zimmermann heard of this 00:12:26.560 --> 00:12:32.800 lawsuit he decided to print his PGP source code in a book format. He even took great care into making 00:12:32.800 --> 00:12:38.240 the book easily scannable. He too, asked for a commodity jurisdiction on his book but the State 00:12:38.240 --> 00:12:44.160 Department was now more aware of the situation and did not grant him the right to export the book, 00:12:44.160 --> 00:12:49.600 but really didn’t deny him either. The State Department just sat on the request for a while. 00:12:49.600 --> 00:12:52.800 Phil Zimmermann’s publisher didn’t wait for a response; 00:12:52.800 --> 00:12:58.320 instead they started shipping the book containing his PGP code all over the world. 00:12:58.320 --> 00:13:02.160 The security community took this in various other directions too, such as 00:13:02.160 --> 00:13:07.280 printing algorithms on t-shirts which would then make the t-shirt a regulated munition, and when 00:13:07.280 --> 00:13:11.200 something is a regulated munition like that, you can’t even allow foreigners to read the 00:13:11.200 --> 00:13:17.200 t-shirt. Simply wearing that shirt in front of a foreigner violated the Arms Export Control Act. 00:13:17.200 --> 00:13:24.400 CINDY: Several things happened; I launched a team from EFF with the EFF lawyers, 00:13:24.400 --> 00:13:28.320 launched a lawsuit against the encryption technologies. There were actually three 00:13:28.320 --> 00:13:32.760 lawsuits that were filed. We handled one called Bernstein vs. Department of Justice. 00:13:32.760 --> 00:13:37.680 JACK: Another cryptographer named Dan Bernstein was developing encryption methods that were above 00:13:37.680 --> 00:13:42.640 the regulated limit. In 1995 Bernstein wanted to write about his encryption, 00:13:42.640 --> 00:13:48.320 give talks about it, and publish the source code on the internet. The Arms Export Control 00:13:48.320 --> 00:13:52.880 Act and the International Traffic and Arms Regulation required Bernstein to 00:13:52.880 --> 00:13:58.480 submit his ideas about cryptography to the government for review which also required him 00:13:58.480 --> 00:14:04.480 to register as an arms dealer and to apply for a license. All this simply to publish his ideas 00:14:04.480 --> 00:14:09.840 about cryptography to the internet. Bernstein decided to do battle against the [00:15:00] US 00:14:09.840 --> 00:14:15.000 Department of Justice and he got help from the EFF; specifically, Cindy Cohn herself. 00:14:15.000 --> 00:14:15.440 CINDY: Yeah. 00:14:15.440 --> 00:14:18.720 JACK: The EFF took their best lawyers to go and help out Bernstein. 00:14:18.720 --> 00:14:24.080 CINDY: Yeah, that was exactly what the goal of the litigation was, to make sure 00:14:24.080 --> 00:14:29.680 that people could publish. Publishing on the internet always is an export, right, 00:14:29.680 --> 00:14:33.280 because everybody in the world can see what gets published on the internet. 00:14:33.280 --> 00:14:39.600 We wanted people to be able to publish and share strong encryption on the internet. 00:14:39.600 --> 00:14:46.400 To get there, what we did was we argued that computer programs, computer code was protected 00:14:46.400 --> 00:14:52.320 speech under the First Amendment and that the government’s regulations of that speech 00:14:52.320 --> 00:14:57.040 in the form of the Munitions List Regulations were not consistent with the First Amendment. 00:14:57.040 --> 00:14:59.600 JACK: For the next year Bernstein, Cindy, 00:14:59.600 --> 00:15:07.440 and the EFF did battle against the US Department of Justice. [MUSIC] In 00:15:07.440 --> 00:15:12.920 1996 a professor at Case Western University named Peter Junger also joined the battle. 00:15:12.920 --> 00:15:18.240 CINDY: Yeah, Peter Junger is the third case. He also was arguing – he was a 00:15:18.240 --> 00:15:22.480 law professor but he also had a computer science background. He argued basically 00:15:22.480 --> 00:15:28.000 the same thing as professor Bernstein, that he wanted to publish code as well. 00:15:28.000 --> 00:15:31.520 JACK: Not only did he want to publish code to the internet but he also wanted 00:15:31.520 --> 00:15:36.960 to teach a class on cryptography. But because he included cryptography as a topic of his class, 00:15:36.960 --> 00:15:39.440 he was restricted from accepting foreign students 00:15:39.440 --> 00:15:44.480 in his class. This resulted in Junger challenging the export laws as well. 00:15:44.480 --> 00:15:49.440 CINDY: That case was going on in Cleveland. Our case, the EFF’s case was going on in California 00:15:49.440 --> 00:15:57.040 and then Phil Karn’s case was going on in DC. The three of us all worked together to try to 00:15:57.040 --> 00:16:03.320 make sure that we were putting as much pressure on the government as we could collectively. 00:16:03.320 --> 00:16:07.840 JACK: By this point there were numerous businesses expressing a need for stronger 00:16:07.840 --> 00:16:12.720 encryption for their data. Banks in particular were requesting the government allow them to 00:16:12.720 --> 00:16:17.440 use a stronger encryption method. Specifically, the US government was not allowing encryption 00:16:17.440 --> 00:16:23.520 that was over 40 bits in length to be used on the internet. Around this time AT&T created a 00:16:23.520 --> 00:16:27.920 phone that would encrypt a phone call. It basically created a modem connection from 00:16:27.920 --> 00:16:34.560 one end to the other and digitized the voice and then did a DES encryption on the data. AT&T sold 00:16:34.560 --> 00:16:40.800 these phones for $1,400 in the mid-90s. The US government freaked out about this phone. They 00:16:40.800 --> 00:16:45.760 contacted AT&T and said they have a better solution. The government had been working on 00:16:45.760 --> 00:16:50.800 a new way to encrypt data electronically using a specialized computer microchip. 00:16:50.800 --> 00:16:56.960 The encryption was far superior to the common DES, possibly even unbreakable. The government 00:16:56.960 --> 00:17:01.440 called this the Clipper Chip. The government developed this chip for anyone who wanted to 00:17:01.440 --> 00:17:07.840 use stronger encryption and so, a solution was found. The government urged AT&T to use the chip 00:17:07.840 --> 00:17:12.800 on their phone. AT&T was hesitant at first but the government offered to buy a bunch of these 00:17:12.800 --> 00:17:17.840 phones if they added the chip. AT&T added the Clipper Chip into the phone and the US 00:17:17.840 --> 00:17:24.160 government bought a ton of these phones, but in the features of the Clipper Chip there was 00:17:24.160 --> 00:17:31.200 one rather large asterisk. The Clipper Chip had a backdoor key built into it which allowed the 00:17:31.200 --> 00:17:37.120 government to decrypt any message encrypted by the chip. The government was basically allowing people 00:17:37.120 --> 00:17:44.160 to use a rather strong encryption method but had a key to break the encryption if they needed it. 00:17:44.160 --> 00:17:49.280 The idea was that the government would be the only one who would ever have the key. 00:17:49.280 --> 00:17:53.920 CINDY: One of the things that happened right after that got released, is a guy by the name of Matt 00:17:53.920 --> 00:17:59.280 Blaze, who’s now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania of Computer Science, a very famous 00:17:59.280 --> 00:18:05.360 computer science professor demonstrated that these Clipper Chips were really insecure and 00:18:05.360 --> 00:18:11.040 demonstrated what we all know is true right now, is that if you’re going – you can’t build a door 00:18:11.040 --> 00:18:15.520 into strong encryption and only expect the good guys to ever figure out what the key is, 00:18:15.520 --> 00:18:19.520 to ever have a key to it. If you’re going to weaken the encryption, they’ll let the good guys 00:18:19.520 --> 00:18:25.600 have a key. You’re going to weaken the encryption such so that the bad guys will have access too. 00:18:25.600 --> 00:18:32.480 The demonstration of the flaws in the Clipper Chip that Matt Blaze did was really central to 00:18:32.480 --> 00:18:36.560 this [00:20:00] conversation because ultimately it meant that the government dropped the Clipper 00:18:36.560 --> 00:18:46.080 Chip idea. That was the first nail in the coffin of the government’s crypto policy. The second 00:18:46.080 --> 00:18:50.240 thing that happened was we were beginning to win our lawsuit. We won it at the District Court and 00:18:50.240 --> 00:18:59.360 then we also won it at the Court of Appeals. At the same time there were efforts in Congress that 00:18:59.360 --> 00:19:05.040 were moving along a little more slowly. There was also direct pressure on the administration from 00:19:05.040 --> 00:19:14.400 the tech companies and Al Gore, who was wanting to be president after Clinton and was a pretty 00:19:14.400 --> 00:19:20.560 technically savvy guy. He understood that this position wasn’t very good and he wanted 00:19:20.560 --> 00:19:27.200 to curry favor with this growing Silicon Valley group of companies. Ultimately what happened, 00:19:27.200 --> 00:19:32.680 the government decided that they were not going to keep encryption on the Munitions List anymore. 00:19:32.680 --> 00:19:38.400 JACK: On November 15, 1996, Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 00:19:38.400 --> 00:19:45.200 13026 which removed encryption from the Munitions List. The Executive Order also 00:19:45.200 --> 00:19:49.920 moved who oversees encryption from the US State Department to the US Department of 00:19:49.920 --> 00:19:54.800 Commerce. Signing the Executive Order was a major victory for the civil rights activists. 00:19:54.800 --> 00:19:58.480 CINDY: I’m sure that we had a party because we always had parties back 00:19:58.480 --> 00:20:06.720 then. I’m sure that we did. I think there was much champagne and 00:20:06.720 --> 00:20:11.920 we were really happy about it. We were a little nervous that they would backtrack. We actually 00:20:11.920 --> 00:20:18.240 had some meetings with the government about it and ultimately I flew to DC 00:20:18.240 --> 00:20:23.920 and we had some meetings with them to settle on exactly what this was going to look like. 00:20:23.920 --> 00:20:31.200 JACK: Actually, it turns out the government was still holding a position on the battlefront. 00:20:31.200 --> 00:20:36.840 See, the government was still requiring you to get a license for encryption and still regulated it. 00:20:36.840 --> 00:20:41.200 CINDY: The government only licensed 40-bit DES. They said you can have all the encryption you 00:20:41.200 --> 00:20:47.760 want as long as it’s 40-bit which is a little like saying you can have all the security you 00:20:47.760 --> 00:20:55.200 want as long as there’s nothing but a really weak lock on your door. It was becoming obvious 00:20:55.200 --> 00:21:00.240 that people needed more encryption than something that was stronger encryption than just 40 bits. 00:21:00.240 --> 00:21:06.400 JACK: Because encryption was limited to only 40 bits in length it severely limited how secure our 00:21:06.400 --> 00:21:12.160 computers could be. There were numerous stronger cyphers available but under government regulation 00:21:12.160 --> 00:21:19.760 this was not allowed to be used. A company called RSA Security sponsored a DES challenge. 00:21:19.760 --> 00:21:25.920 They offered a reward for anyone who could crack the DES cypher. In 1997 a group found 00:21:25.920 --> 00:21:32.160 a way to brute-force and crack a DES message. It took them 39 days to decipher the message. 00:21:32.160 --> 00:21:35.920 Cryptographers thought this would be enough for the government to allow people to use stronger 00:21:35.920 --> 00:21:41.840 encryption but that didn’t happen. NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, 00:21:41.840 --> 00:21:46.480 still considered DES to be safe. The government downplayed the issue by 00:21:46.480 --> 00:21:51.680 saying 39 days to crack the code was too long of a time for it to be a significant threat. 00:21:51.680 --> 00:21:59.680 CINDY: One of the things that happened as a result of this weird disconnect is that EFF 00:21:59.680 --> 00:22:08.480 created a tool called the DES Cracker. They still exist. It was a hardware tool that basically, 00:22:08.480 --> 00:22:17.600 very cheaply, could break DES. The reason to do that was to demonstrate that the government wasn’t 00:22:17.600 --> 00:22:21.840 being straight with people about how secure the technology was and that we needed to move 00:22:21.840 --> 00:22:26.880 to a more secure government standard. DES is a government standard. If you’re going to sell to 00:22:26.880 --> 00:22:30.560 the government or you’re in the financial industry you need to be licensed by the government. 00:22:30.560 --> 00:22:38.240 JACK: The EFF called this tool Deep Crack and could crack a DES message in just 56 hours. 00:22:38.240 --> 00:22:44.640 But still, the government did not change their stance on DES and still continued to endorse it. 00:22:44.640 --> 00:22:50.880 A few months after that the EFF and the winners of the first DES challenge joined together to 00:22:50.880 --> 00:22:57.680 develop an even faster way to crack DES. They were able to crack a message in just 22 hours. 00:22:57.680 --> 00:23:00.880 CINDY: We did it because we weren’t getting anywhere with the government. 00:23:00.880 --> 00:23:05.520 They were pretending, again, continuing to pretend that the emperor had clothes on when 00:23:05.520 --> 00:23:09.360 we were pointing out that the emperor didn’t have any clothes. What EFF built 00:23:09.360 --> 00:23:14.800 was completely available for bad guys to build all over the world. We didn’t create anything. 00:23:14.800 --> 00:23:20.000 We just demonstrated to the public what was long-known privately which was any bad guys 00:23:20.000 --> 00:23:24.560 with access to really straightforward, off the shelf technology could build something that 00:23:24.560 --> 00:23:31.280 would break the security that all these financial institutions were relying on to protect our money. 00:23:31.280 --> 00:23:36.320 JACK: This was the [00:25:00] last battle of the war. Once someone could crack a DES message in 00:23:36.320 --> 00:23:41.680 under a day, the US government agreed it was no longer secure. They released a new cypher 00:23:41.680 --> 00:23:48.320 called Advanced Encryption Standard, or AES. AES used 120-bit strength and was far superior 00:23:48.320 --> 00:23:56.720 to the 40-bit DES. They also allowed triple DES which was a stronger version of DES. By 1999 all 00:23:56.720 --> 00:24:02.560 court cases were dropped by the US government and new, stronger encryption methods were allowed. By 00:24:02.560 --> 00:24:08.720 the year 2000 the government stopped requiring licensing or restricting key lengths altogether. 00:24:08.720 --> 00:24:12.720 People were now allowed to encrypt their communication with as strong of encryption 00:24:12.720 --> 00:24:17.840 method as they wanted. Businesses were able to utilize the most cutting-edge encryption 00:24:17.840 --> 00:24:23.760 to secure their transactions and data. Of course, Phil Zimmermann could publish his code online and 00:24:23.760 --> 00:24:29.440 Peter Junger could accept non-US students in his class that talks about cryptography. By the year 00:24:29.440 --> 00:24:35.200 2000 the first set of the Crypto Wars were over, marking a major victory for our civil rights. 00:24:35.200 --> 00:24:39.840 We are now safer and our privacy is more protected because of it. We have 00:24:39.840 --> 00:24:44.560 these internet crypto warriors to thank for paving the way for our privacy and security. 00:24:44.560 --> 00:24:47.600 CINDY: I think personally, it’s the thing I’m most proud of, 00:24:47.600 --> 00:24:52.400 that I’ve accomplished by working with EFF. I think EFF has done lots of other things but I 00:24:52.400 --> 00:24:59.920 had such a central role in this. I’m very, very proud of the work that we did. I think 00:24:59.920 --> 00:25:06.760 we set up today’s internet to be a place where people have the right to have strong security. 00:25:06.760 --> 00:25:13.120 JACK: But this story’s not over. This is just the story of the first Crypto Wars. Shortly 00:25:13.120 --> 00:25:19.520 after this the government began attacking crypto in new ways which went entirely undetected for a 00:25:19.520 --> 00:25:25.520 long time. But that’s a story for another time. People ask me if I think we’re becoming more 00:25:25.520 --> 00:25:31.840 secure or less secure online over time. After researching this episode I definitely think 00:25:31.840 --> 00:25:37.040 we’re becoming more secure because once crypto was allowed at any strength on the internet, 00:25:37.040 --> 00:25:40.800 it opened up the doors for websites to encrypt their whole website and not just 00:25:40.800 --> 00:25:46.720 a log-in page or a credit card page. More and more websites are going full HTTPS, 00:25:46.720 --> 00:25:53.440 making all of their communication to it private. The EFF creates tools like HTTPS everywhere, 00:25:53.440 --> 00:26:00.160 which is a browser plug-in to allow us to use HTTPS where available. What’s more is when strong 00:26:00.160 --> 00:26:04.800 encryption is showing up in our everyday lives without us even knowing it’s there. 00:26:04.800 --> 00:26:09.040 We don’t even have to enable it and in fact, we can’t disable the encryption even if we wanted 00:26:09.040 --> 00:26:14.320 to. For instance, Facebook uses a protocol called Signal to do end-to-end encryption of 00:26:14.320 --> 00:26:19.360 their messaging service. PGP had a hard time getting mass adoption because it was hard 00:26:19.360 --> 00:26:24.640 to use but now even the most technologically illiterate people are using strong encryption 00:26:24.640 --> 00:26:29.200 when talking with their friends on Facebook. When these strong encryption methods become 00:26:29.200 --> 00:26:34.560 integrated into our lives in ways that make it easy for us to use, we become safer and our 00:26:34.560 --> 00:26:41.440 privacy is protected. Encryption is becoming more seamless and more integrated in so many products. 00:26:41.440 --> 00:26:46.560 Yes, a lot of technology we use every day still isn’t using good security practices 00:26:46.560 --> 00:26:50.720 like text messaging and standard phone calls. But there are still major wins 00:26:50.720 --> 00:26:56.000 in the name of privacy and online security that happen all the time. We’ll never become 00:26:56.000 --> 00:27:00.960 fully safe and secure online because it’s simply a hostile environment but 00:27:00.960 --> 00:27:05.280 we can stay vigilant and speak up when we feel our privacy and security is not 00:27:05.280 --> 00:27:16.292 being looked after. When enough of us raise our voices, we can win the next Crypto War. 00:27:16.292 --> 00:27:19.280 JACK (OUTRO): [OUTRO MUSIC] You’ve been listening to Darknet Diaries. For show notes 00:27:19.280 --> 00:27:24.800 and links check out darknetdiaries.com. There you’ll be able to see a picture of the Clipper 00:27:24.800 --> 00:27:34.800 Chip and Deep Crack. Music in this episode is provided by Ian Alex Mac and Kevin MacLeod.