The Cutting Edge: Computing / Technology / Innovation : REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK : Cyberprivacy and the ‘Clipper’
If the annual Digital World conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center has been oddly free of friction this year, that may change today, when Clinton Brooks of the National Security Agency meets civil libertarian and cyberspace legend Philip Zimmerman, author of a notorious data encryption program called Pretty Good Privacy, on a panel titled “Privacy in the Digital World.”
Brooks is one of the leading forces behind the “Clipper Chip,” the government-designed microchip that would encrypt data sent over phone lines--if private industry ever agreed to use it. The catch is that the government would have the key to unlock the encrypted information, the idea being that criminal activity in a digitized form could thus be monitored, ostensibly with the necessary legal safeguards.
The idea was supposed to be balancing the individual’s right to privacy with society’s need to combat crime at a time when more and more information is electronic.
Brooks, who went back and read the Federalist Papers in the course of developing his ideas on Clipper, says he’s been shocked by the overwhelmingly negative reaction. “This goes to the core of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution,” he says, “but society isn’t having a chance to address it.”
The NSA scientist said he looked first to the Internet in hopes of getting “reasoned deliberation” on the subject, but instead was hit with “flames” and hostility.
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“As I began to understand it, I realized the Internet is made up of a lot of immature people, college students for whom it is more fun to make easy snide comments instead of addressing the real issues,” he said.
Zimmerman has a stock comeback: “I think I ought to be able to go up and whisper in your ear even if your ear is 100,000 miles away. If we install Clipper, then we can’t do that, because the government will have a back door into our encrypted communications.”
But Brooks, deeply earnest, maintains: “This country is the most vulnerable nation to the disruption of our information systems because of our high-technology. We need to get out of this petty bickering mode. I’m hoping people here will sense from me that this wasn’t some master conspiracy scheme by the government, so we can get on with the discussion.”
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Nathan Baulick, a multimedia developer from Minneapolis, was less concerned with the Clipper controversy than with Magenta, for whose reappearance he waited patiently. She was last seen dissolving into a glob of ones and zeros, or so it said on the computer screen where Baulick sat in a corner of the cavernous Convention Center on Tuesday.
Baulick waited in one of BayMoo’s hundreds of virtual rooms, described this way: The walls and floors of the root lodge are of soft earth. There are three small tables here, made of old pine. The chairs are also pine, and covered in soft paisley cushions. There is a flicker of soft candlelight. Bill the bartender is behind the old, wood bar.
Like the roughly 1,200 others who thronged the fifth annual Digital World convention, Baulick had come in order to catch up on new technology and meet people from the converging industries of computing, entertainment, consumer electronics and telecommunications. But BayMoo, an all-text virtual reality that anyone can add to and play in over the Internet computer web, kind of drew him in. It’s a kind of game known on-line as a Multi-User Dungeon, or MUD.
“She didn’t ask me to follow her,” he says to no one in particular as Magenta breezes in and out again.
Don’t worry--you can play in the MUD too. Just telnet to mud.crl.com.8888.
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Virtual worlds are, quel surprise, something of a theme at Digital World this year. Other than Catapult, a new interactive firm launching an on-line video game network service, the buzz of the conference was Knowledge Adventure Worlds, which has developed a prototype for AT&T; of an interactive 3-D virtual environment that may become a standard for the next generation of on-line services.
The “world” that company President Dave Gobel demonstrated for a packed audience bore some resemblance to the interactive television interfaces phone companies such as Bell Atlantic and cable companies such as Time Warner have been developing. You can move through rooms and down hallways and choose from a variety of theoretical services, such as home shopping or games. And you can call up a friend via modem and hang out there together, using the keyboard to chat.
But because KA Worlds uses mostly computer-generated graphics and character animation rather than video, plus a powerful compression technology, it doesn’t require a fancy-schmancy broad-band network to make it run. It works over regular telephone lines and most personal computers.
It also does away with text-based pull-down menus, which can be a major turnoff to consumers unfamiliar with computer software such as Microsoft Windows.
A spinoff of La Crescenta-based multimedia developer Knowledge Adventure, which maintains a minority stake in the firm, KA Worlds hopes companies across all industries will commission the firm to develop their own virtual worlds.
For those who find the concept less than obvious, Gobel recommended “Snow Crash,” the recently published Neal Stephenson cyberpunk novel about a virtual realm called Metaverse, which he swears he didn’t see an advance copy of before developing the product: “Read it if you want to know our business plan.”
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Actually, if you want to be a member of the interactive digital age cyber-clique, you’d better read it anyway. It was the last-read book of at least half an informal sampling of Digital World attendees, including Michele DiLorenzo, who was named chief of the newly restructured Viacom New Media on Tuesday.
The move, which was expected after Viacom’s acquisition of Paramount Communications earlier this year, combines Paramount’s Palo Alto-based multimedia publishing arm, Paramount Interactive, with Viacom New Media, based in New York and Chicago.
Viacom also announced the formation of a new group called Viacom Interactive Services, which includes the interactive TV groups of both companies, and creates a new position for former Paramount Technology Group chief Keith Schaefer, who will develop an on-line business strategy for the company from New York. Viacom executives said the reorganization would result in about five layoffs from the organization out of about 150 employees.
