Suppose the U.S. Post Office suddenly insisted that no one could en-close their letters in envelopes? Suppose all telephone lines were turned into old-fashioned "party lines," not only sharing your phone calls with your neighbors, but with anyone else who cared to listen in?

Obviously, you wouldn't like it. Not because you were keeping dirty little secrets (although, as Sam Spade says in The Maltese Falcon,"Everybody has something to hide."), but because you have an expectation of privacy. In fact, you have such a strong expectation of privacy in your communications that you expect to have some precisely where you don't--on the Internet!

Don't be too surprised. There's very little privacy anywhere.

A friend of mine a few years back worked for the government. Whenever she answered the telephone at work, she had to begin with the pre-scribed words: "This line is not secure."

That put a different twist on the world for me, and I began to realize not only that most telephone lines are not secure, but that nearly all the privacy we take for granted is not secure.

This point of view was underscored for me recently, when my cellular phone was illegally cloned. One day I got a call from my cellular phone service provider. "Your phone has been cloned," a young woman told me, brightly. How did they know? "Easy. We monitor all subscribers for their patterns of calling," she said, without a trace of self-consciousness. "In fact, we tape every minute of every phone call we handle, just to have a record of who's making them."

And of what has been said, perhaps ? You may think I'm paranoid, but consider the case of Ian Murphy. Today, he's President and Chief Executive Officer of IAM/Secure Data Systems, Inc., Gladwyne, PA, but in 1981 he became the first hacker to be arrested, for tapping White House phone lines and tampering with telephone company computers. Murphy is busy, and successful, selling com puter security--such as it is. His clients range from foreign governments and the White House to major corporations, and they're happy with his services.

But--are you sitting down?--Mr. Murphy won't have a Web home page. In fact, he won't even have an e-mail address! He knows first hand how little security there actually is on today's computer networks, and while he's in the business of making other people feel safe, he won't put his own firm's information into a situation where he knows it can be compromised quite easily by people just like himself.

Step One: Why Worry About Privacy

It doesn't take much investigation to discover that most computerized communications are wide open to third parties who want to know more about you. Just as the FBI can and does go through trash to help monitor and catch suspected criminals, as yet unspecified government agencies certainly can go through the Internet's electronic mail to see who's talking about what, and to whom. In fact, electronic mail is whole lot less secure than paper-based mail, if only because computers can scan millions of electronic missives far easier and more completely than people can read what you mail within sealed envelopes.

A recent survey by MACWORLD magazine found that more than 20% of businesses in the U.S. acknowledge that they have monitored and/or scanned through their employees' computerized files, e-mail, or in-house voice mail messages. The extent of unacknowledged access into these sorts of files is impossible to calculate. That's why most people who are knowledgeable about computer security are reluctant to put any type of "clear," or unencrypted information onto computers.

If you're working with network or workgroup software provided by your employer, it's almost certain that the network administrator or technical support group has the power to bypass or temporarily change your password, and then review all your files without leaving you a clue that it happened. Just as you probably wouldn't discuss private matters on your office telephone, it's equally wise not to leave any private information in computer files where anyone else from your company can find them. But even if you're out on your own, you're not much safer. Any dis-gruntled worker who works for your Internet access provider might get his hands on your password and distribute it--along with hundreds or< thousands more--to others, for pay or just for fun.

It's no wonder that a 1994 survey by Louis Harris and Associates found that more than 80% of Americans are concerned about their privacy--a much higher figure than similar Harris polls found in 1992 and 1978. Here are some concrete reasons to fear today's electronic threats to your privacy:

*There are some 5 billion database "records" kept on U.S. citizens, much of it requested and sent as often as five or six times a day. The people most frequently denied access are, not surprisingly, those whose lives are reflected in the records. More than half a billion of these records are sealed away from the general public, despite the supposed openness mandated by the 1974 Privacy Act. That's why the U.S. Congress' Office of Technology Assessment has warned: "It's virtually impossible for most citizens to know where files about them exist and when they have been misused."

*Motor vehicle files provide your address, date of birth, height, weight, and sometimes your Social Security number. Mortgage records reveal where you bank, how much your house costs and what your monthly payment is. Additional information is held in the form of marriage licenses, birth and death certificates and various boating, hunting or business licenses and permits.

*TRW, Equifax and Trans Union do a brisk business selling details< from about 500 million database records they have collected and currently maintain describing details of about 160 million American lives. They know your Social Security number, credit card details, mortgage status, employment and salary history, and places of residence. In an hour, your local auto dealership or real estate agent can find out more about you than you've told your own mother, and it costs less than $100 for the full report.

*There's a lucrative grey market in private bank records, credit card purchase records, unpublished phone numbers, and IRS files. One company has hooked up with Chase Manhattan bank to offer "Privacy Guard" protection at $49 per year. It doesn't actually protect very much of your privacy, but it does let you monitor the computerized records on you and your family, to some extent. At least you can more easily discover what others can learn about you.

*No federal laws protect you from the typical invasions of your privacy now available to computerized criminals. Your legal protection is so thin that one of the strongest protections covers your video tape rental records. Passed largely to protect Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork's habit of renting "adult" videos, the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act makes your video-viewing preferences better protected than your bank account numbers or auto driving record.

*One of the fastest growing crimes is based on finding and stealing credit data. Computerized criminals search the Internet and its resources for satisfactory credit reports, then manipulate the files to get themselves credit cards, mortgages and other cash benefits. Trans Union recently began citing as many as 6,000 fraud complaints per month!

*Everytime you buy an airline ticket, your name, address, credit card number and destination are entered into the airline's computerized reservation system. It doesn't take long before it's tapped by unscrupulous hackers who can sell the details to criminals looking to match these data with other information--such as savings and credit account balances--for their own unscrupulous purposes.

*Even your friendly Post Office's change-of-address forms are keypunched into a computer system. It's done primarily so the Post Office can earn a little extra money by renting the names of people who are moving to direct marketers at their new destinations. But the information becomes readily available to people who are tapping the net for combinations of factors that suggest a person's bank account might go unused for a few weeks, allowing extra time to put through bogus transactions.

While disgruntled people are probably the most likely cause of "insider" infringements on your privacy, any well-trained detectivecan tap these sources to find out plenty about you. You can even see advertisements for these services in your daily newspaper's classifieds. And there are many other, unlicensed and less law-abiding people out there who are looking for kicks, interested in seeing how much trouble they can cause, testing their programming skills against "the system," or just reeling under the influence of a troubled mind. These people--or those to whom they distribute such confidential information--forage for private information like wolves constantly test the herds in search of the weaker antelope and elk. Even if your messages don't contain trade secrets, insider financial information, or matters the law requires you to keep confidential, they could easily contain clues to the most intimate details of your private life, your political beliefs, or even just your vacation plans--a subject in which burglars tend to be very interested. And once the information gets away from you, there's no telling how far afield it can travel.

Most people have no idea all this is true. They live in blissful ignorance, and continue to send e-mail without any form of encryption. That's why it's not enough just to be sure in your own mind that maintaining privacy is a good thing. You've got to spread the word.

One good way to get others interested in protecting their privacy, and thus yours, is to add an encrypted "signature" to every file you send. It gives the message a distinctive look, and piques the interest of other people. Once they ask you "What is that thing?," you can begin to talk about the advantages of privacy.

Levels Of Privacy and Security

All this helps explain why uncounted thousands of people are struggling to overcome the "security is not important" training from their formative years--akin to growing up in a rural community where everyone goes to sleep each night with all their doors and windows unlocked--and trying to replace it with simple, practical habits to help maintain their personal privacy in an increasingly voyeuristic world.

Before we launch into the details however, let me define five levels of need for privacy and security.

Level One:   You're trying to arrange a private one-time meeting, perhaps for sex, perhaps for a business deal, or for something else. You can remember all the details, so you have no need to keep records or correspondence.

Level Two: You're trying to manage a private ongoing relationship, perhaps for sex, perhaps for business, or for something else. Because there's far more data than you can remember, you need to protect some records. Also, you want to maintain a semi-regular flow of private and secure information to and from your "partner" in this enterprise.

Level Three: You're conducting normal, legal business activities that you want to keep private and secure--perhaps from competitors, perhaps from unknown others who might gain by knowing the details of your thoughts, decisions, and actions. Now you need to maintain the privacy and security of extensive written records, business trans- actions, and regular communications. But for the business to make sense and earn a profit, your privacy and security efforts must remain cost-effective and personally convenient.

Level Four:  You're conducting some form of illegal business that you definitely want to keep secret from both random and purposeful prying eyes. Your activities involve many of the same procedures as for Level Three, except that privacy and security are far more important.

Level Five:  You're actively involved in fomenting armed revolution and/or acts of terrorism. Your activities involve many of the same procedures as for Level Three and Four, but privacy and security are now of paramount importance, regardless of cost or inconvenience.

Be warned: My thinking runs only to Level Three.
Anyone who is interested in Level Four or Five privacy and security will not find useful tips or techniques here.

It's not a pretty picture, but it's a fact of life. Anyone with a little savvy, a little money, a little access to a communicating com- puter, and a little time can find out more about you than you may know yourself.

That's because any public records, including your driver's license, social security number, court filings, and dozens of other facts are readily included in computerized databases now being made available to anyone willing to answer "Yes" when asked: "Do you have a legitimate business purpose for this information?"

But while some take all this as an argument for spending only cash and moving to a mountain-top somewhere, most of the rest of us--equally concerned about privacy--are just interested in limiting the damage as much as possible.

New Threats

With the advent of the Internet, and its phenomenal popularity, oursociety is developing a need for an entirely new mechanism to monitor and protect so-called "transactional data" and other records that can be correlated to reveal details of an individual's most intimate preferences, habits, and behaviors.

The future could be far more frightening, with new technologies making it possible for intruders to track not only your spending habits, but combinations of your interests in political issues, your voting patterns, and your business relationships.

Is anyone surprised there are proposals for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to collect and maintain a national database of DNA identification records?

It's not difficult to imagine a scenario in which corporate or government interests lead to routine monitoring of these matters for millions of citizens, and on that basis to selective support of, or opposition to, individuals' day-to-day activities.

Basic Privacy Procedures

Within the last few years, at least a portion of the American population has begun to voice more support for privacy protection than ever before. People from all parts of the political spectrum are talking, and even working together to fight what they perceive as the current "anti-privacy" trend in our country, and around the world.

Americans are generally proud of our long tradition of privacy and freedom from unnecessary surveillance and "search." But many people feel that today's legal system has allowed privacy to be significantly eroded.

In their view, Europe has moved far ahead of us in establishing unified data protection authorities and passing laws protecting privacy far more stringently than in the United States. There may be a good deal of truth to this allegation.

Legal Protections

The Privacy Act of 1974, for example, protects only against the abuse of records maintained by U.S. government agencies on American citizens. It says nothing about privately held records or information concerning citizens of foreign countries. And many say there is precious little enforcement of this statute, in any case. That's one reason there is a steady stream of legal battles about the legality and propriety of selling Motor Vehicle databases, which contain information collected by public agencies about such private matters as your address, age, height, weight, eyesight, health, and the kind of car you own.

Medical, insurance, and employment records are also spottily protected, and the protections are unevenly enforced.

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 set a new standard by allowing telephone companies to sell their records of our phone calls to almost anyone who wants them.

In this milieu, people are understandably concerned not only that agencies of the government might be logging your email messages or recording your cellular telephone calls, but that for-profit corporations might be collecting, correlating, and selling detailed dossiers on you without any concern about why or how they will be used.

Simple Protections...
Basic rules for guarding your privacy on computer networks include:

* Treating your e-mail as if it were written on postcards, with photo-
  copiers available at every postoffice.

* Never send critical information , account numbers, passwords, or any sensitive data through e-mail channels unless you've used a reliable form of encryption.

* Watching your language.

* Aside from pornographic concerns, if you have ever indicated, for example, a tax-evading motivation in a private e-mail to your accountant, years later the IRS could subpoena a system administrator somewhere enroute and force him or her to check through back-up files and deliver up your messages for their review.

* Checking the security procedures of your access providers.

* Major and minor companies have been electronically invaded recently, and tens of thousands of credit card numbers stolen. How do you know your credit card number is safe? If you don't like your current provider's privacy procedures, it's easy to change to a different provider.

* Avoid easy passwords.

* Your name, family members' names, your birth date, and celebrity names and dates are all easy prey for invaders. So are all the words in every dictionary. Take a minute to think of a password that includes upper and lower case letters, numbers, and punctuation marks in some random order. Simple substitutions like these make passwords far harder to crack. To be safe, change your password at least four times a year, and never, ever leave it written down near your computer.

* Be alert to financial transactions in all your accounts.

Sometimes, thieves empty all your cash out of your accounts in a few hours or days. But other times they drain $10 per month for years. If they do this in thousands of individual accounts, it becomes a nice living. So check for transactions you haven't authorized. Also, at least once a year check your own credit report. It'll show if an account has been opened in your name without your permission.

Once you feel there's spurious activity in your accounts or an error in a public-records file, pay for a a background check on yourself. >The Yellow Pages lists firms that can investigate you in detail for as little as $200-$300. If their sleuthing finds a problem before your credit is destroyed and your home sold out from under you by people who have no right to do so, their fee is a bargain.

So that's the long version of why you need to know about Pretty Good Privacy.

Obtaining PGP

PGP 5.5.3i This is the one I use

PGP 6.0 The Newest Version

How To Get Your Friends On Board For Private Communications

I am the first to admit it. I wasn't brought up to live a "private" life in the modern sense. Sure, I'm relatively quiet about my private life, about my finances, my most audacious plans, and my innermost hopes and dreams. But I don't have bug-sweepers on my phone lines, bodyguards, metal detectors, offshore trusts holding my assets, or security lights and cameras guarding the periphery of my family compound.

So at this point, it's still taking a certain conscious effort for me repeatedly take specific actions to maintain the privacy of my computerized information.

But I have begun to recognize that there are significant dangers, if I don't. For example, in the last few months, I found out that Kevin Mitnick had my credit card number in his stolen list of 20,000 such numbers. I received a telephone call explaining that my cellular phone had been cloned and used within 24 hours to run up a pretty hefty bill on world-wide calls. I even had my newly replaced credit card number captured when the police rounded up a bad guy on an unrelated charge. And that's just the last few months.

What's more, I have friends in foreign countries, and I'm interested in talking to them about local political and military activities: checking out stories of torture, fraud and theft on a grand scale, even secret conspiracies both overseas and at home to mis-inform and dis-inform the general public--of which I am a somewhat dissatisfied member. But I'm reluctant to ask the questions or get them to give me the honest answers when I now how easily third parties can intercept our messages.

So I have begun to recognize the importance of keeping some of my ideas and my messages and my account numbers away from prying eyes. But that brings me to a practical problem. To ensure your own privacy, at least with regard to computerized files and electronic messaging, you must get the people with whom you're exchanging information to do the same.

This generally involves a two step process:

First, convince these other people of the need to keep their files--"at least those they exchange with you"--private;

Second, Get them to take care of the technical matters of getting and learning to use the same software that you're using.

Obtaining PGP

PGP 6.5.8i This is the one I use at this time. RSA

PGP 7.0 The Newest Version. They do not seem to be compatible with older versions.

Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, is an extremely sophisticated, yet fairly easy to use encryption system for use with DOS, System 7.x, Unix, VAX/VMS, and other computers.

It incorporates a highly advanced form of public/private, or two-key, encryption to allow the exchange of files not only with "pretty good privacy," but with equally good authentication. In other words, if you receive a PGP encrypted file that appears to be from me, you can be certain that it actually is from me, and that it hasn't been tampered with since I encrypted it.

What's more, because it uses the two-key encryption system, there's no need for any secure channels. The files you encrypt and send to others, along with your public key, can be freely distributed over public com- puter networks. Heck, you can even publish them in your favorite daily newspapers.

That's the whole point of a two-key encryption system. (See Understand- ing The Two-Key Encryption System below). The only key that really matters for security is your private key, and that one you keep with you, never transmit to anyone, and can therefore be pretty sure of.

Understanding Two-Key Encryption Systems

Two-key encryption systems represent a breakthrough technology that makes privacy on computer networks extremely simple to achieve, even >when there are no "secure lines" you can trust.

In a single key encryption system, the same key is used to encode and decode a file. Remember your Captain Video Decoder Ring? It was a primitive single key system. You'd encode your secret message, such as "Drink Your Ovaltine," by replacing the letters of the alphabet with substitute letters from a certain number of places away. For example, let's say we decide to use the key "+4." That would mean we'd switch each letter in our message with the letter that comes four places later in the alphabet. D would become H, R would become V, and so on.

You--or anyone else who knows the key--can easily switch the H back to a D, the V back to an R, and figure out what we're drinking.

Clearly, then, the single key in a one-key system must itself be kept very secret, while somehow still being transmitted to the person receiving encoded files. Even if the key is transmitted safely, which you can never know for certain, the recipient can never be sure the received messages haven't been intercepted by the enemy, altered, and passed along to create havoc and disarray.

But with a two-key system, these problems disappear. A two-key system uses one key to encode a file, and another to decode it. Once you have encoded a file, the same key won't decode it again. Only the other one of the two-key pair will do that.

This means you can freely make one key known to the entire world. This key--your public key--is available for use by anyone who wants to send you a file. But once the file is encoded using your public key, only your second key--your private key--will decode it.

So in practice, I can use your public key to encode a file and send it to you. You can then use your private key to read it. Then you can use my public key to encode your reply before you send it to me, and I can use my private key to decode that.

Even better, I can encode each message twice. First, I can use my pri-
vate key to encode virtually all of the message once, except for a few lines saying who I am. Then I can encode the complete file a second time using your public key- so you will be the only one able to read it. Now when you get the file and decode it with your private key, the important part remains encoded. But my public key will easily decode that part--offering you positive proof that I sent you the message and it hasn't been tampered with.

Despite all these precautions, it's probably true that the CIA or any- one else with massive resources, multiple super-computers and top- quality code-breaking experts can still decode any message you protect by PGP. But it's unlikely that your message will be all that important when it's finally fully decoded--ten or twenty years from now!

How safe are PGP-encrypted files? In a benchmark test, a file encrypted via PGP using only a 128-bit key was made publicly available. It took a cadre of the world's most enthusiastic crackers about eight months to decode it. Today, PGP is capable of using 2033-bit keys, which have never yet been cracked.

PGP is available to individuals for personal, non-commercial use as
freeware from many different bulletin boards and Internet sites. It's
also available for a fee from ViaCrypt, based in Phoenix, AZ. For legal
reasons, commercial firms in the U.S. and Canada must use only a
licensed version of the software from ViaCrypt. Contact ViaCrypt by
telephone at 602-944-0773, or by Internet at viacrypt@acm.org.

Once you get PGP, you use it to generate your own unique pair of keys --one to make public, and one to keep private. Then you begin to accu- mulate the public keys from people with whom you intend to communicate.

This is easy because there are PGP servers on the Internet that do nothing but keep track of public keys. You upload your own key to one of them--they automatically share all the public keys with each other-- and you can also download whichever public keys you want.

Note : by Bill Sanders 08 / 29 / 99 Encrypting and Decrypting Messages

To encrypt a message, first compose it in your favorite word processor
or text editor. Then save it, either as a coded word processor file if
you're sure your recipient wants to receive it that way, or as a plain
ASCII file.

Next enter the command "pgp -e textfile her_userid" (if you have a
front end program, do whatever is required) to trigger the encryption
process, specifying both the name of the file and the person for whom
you want that file encrypted.

You refer to the file by its regular file name, and to recipients (or
senders of files you receive) by a simple identifier. Most people use
their full name plus their e-mail address (such as "Robert A. Moskowitz
") as their identifier to limit the chance that
anyone will specify the wrong person. PGP automatically associates each
identifier with the complex computer "key" it uses to encode or decode
files to/from that person.

If you're planning to e-mail the encrypted file to your recipient, you
should include the letter "a" in the above command string (or select
that option from your PGP front-end). This forces PGP to convert the
encrypted file into only the alpha-numeric characters that e-mail
systems can handle. If you don't select this option, be sure to trans-
mit encrypted files as if they were program files, using the "binary"
or similar option. Or save them to a floppy disk and send that.

When you receive a PGP-encrypted file, you decrypt it by issuing the
command: "pgp ciphertextfile". This assumes the encrypted file carries
a ".pgp" filename extension. If it doesn't, just type in the full
filename as it exists. Normally, PGP tries to save the decoded message
in a file with a name similar to the encoded filename it has just
processed. However, if you add the optional command "-o," you can
specify whatever name you prefer for the decoded file.

PGP does its work by copying files, so it leaves your original message
files, and the original encrypted files you receive from others,
untouched.

Managing Keys

Because PGP relies on having the right keys for encoding and decoding
files, you must pay attention to certain simple key-management pro-
cedures:

To create your own keys: Start by giving PGP the command "-kg." This
triggers a key generation sequence which includes a request for some
random typing by you. PGP uses your keystroke timing and sequence
patterns to help generate a unique key-pair for you.

The program also asks you how many bits to use in creating your new
keys. The more bits you specify, the more time it takes to encode and
decode files, but the more security you obtain.

Finally, PGP asks you to specify a passphrase, just to make it a
little harder for anyone to use your secret key if they should somehow
obtain it. Don't write it down, or choose one easy to guess, such as
your birthday or middle name. Of course, should you suspect your secret
key has been stolen or copied, you immediately use PGP to create a Key
Revocation Certificate which, along with a brand new public key, you
disseminate as quickly and as widely as possible.

When you first get the program, you might want to experiment a bit.
For example, you can generate two pairs of 5- or 10-bit keys, plus a
one paragraph file to encrypt and decrypt and send to your other self a
few times. This helps you get the hang of the process. But you won't
need much practice: PGP is generally simple and straightforward to use,
and fully explained in the documentation that comes with the program.
If you have a problem, you can usually get help from  or
by posting a message in the "alt.security.pgp" newsgroup.

To obtain other people's public keys: The easiest way, of course, is
to ask for them. Your colleagues, clients, and friends can easily e-
mail you their public keys, and PGP makes it easy to add each one to
your "public keyring"--a file where PGP looks for such information
when asked to encode an outgoing message.

But you can also get public keys from other sources: specialized public
key servers on the internet, such  and
Four11 . Since these servers share public keys and
Key Revocation Certificates with each other, communicating with just
one is normally enough to get you what you want.

If a secret key is compromised: Give PGP the command "-kd" with the
person's identifier. If you give your own identifier, the software
creates a special file you make public as widely as possible. This
file tells other copies of PGP not to use the corresponding public key
any longer.

If you give someone else's identifier, PGP disables that key on your
public keyring.

Obtaining PGP
Update : Sept. 29th. 1998
All these are Freeware.

PGP 5.5.3i This is the one I use

PGP 6.0 The Newest Version

PGP Software is generally obtainable free of charge, and online. First,
use Anonymous FTP to connect with "net-dist.mit.edu" and switch to the
directory /pub/PGP. Download the README file for instructions. This
will tell you to download "rsalicen.txt" and "mitlicen.txt," which
contain license agreements for the internal algorithms used in PGP, and
for the software itself.

If you can agree to comply with the terms of these licenses, you
TELNET to "net-dist.mit.edu" and login with the word "getpgp."

MIT's computer now asks you four questions, and then gives you the
directory name where the PGP software is located. This name changes
every half hour, so once you get the name, use FTP to log in and down-
load the PGP files right away.

After you unpack the compressed PGP system files, you'll see that PGP
comes with plenty of documentation and background discussion material.
Also, the program comes ready to operate in English, French, Spanish,
German, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese.

Please note: PGP is export restricted by the Office of Export Admini-
stration, United States Department of Commerce and the Offices of
Defense Trade Controls and Munitions Control, United States Department
of State. This means that PGP cannot be exported or reexported, dir-
ectly or indirectly, (a) without all export or reexport licenses and
governmental approvals required by any applicable laws, or (b) in
violation of any prohibition against the export or reexport of any
part of PGP. PGP already exists outside the U.S., of course, but I
recommend that you not be someone who sends another copy there.

Security For The Macintosh

System 7.5 includes its own encryption and authentication capabili-
ties, but most people consider these nearly worthless. Since Apple
wanted to export their operating system, they complied with U.S.
government restrictions on the encryption techniques they could use.
Even worse, the key length is limited to 40 bits, far less secure than
a 1024-bit key would make the same files.

Fortunately, there is a version of PGP for the Macintosh. Users report
that MacPGP is fairly simple to use, and its encrypted files are
entirely compatible with PGP software for other operating systems.

However, the PGP code was ported to System 7.x from original source
code, and only then was a Mac interface grafted on. As a result,
MacPGP does not operate in true Mac style.

Also, MacPGP can't be linked directly to e-mail. This means you must
download all your messages, then get into PGP and decrypt each one
separately.

Even worse, not every Macintosh can use MacPGP. Some users complain
the software will not run--sometimes won't even load--on their Mac+,
probably because the front-end interface is not entirely compatible
with Mac+ hardware requirements.

Other users complain there are too many user selectable options, and
changing options is more difficult than with preferences files. There
are some who want at least a few MacPGP options to be made into defaults.

Here's a summary of PGP's most frequently used commands:

Encryption Commands:

pgp -e textfile her_userid
This command encrypts a plaintext file with the recipient's public
key.

pgp -s textfile [-u your_userid]
This command signs a plaintext file with your signature, using your
own secret key.

pgp -sta textfile [-u your_userid]
This command signs a plaintext file with your signature, using your
secret key, and leaves the output readable to people without running
PGP first.

pgp -es textfile her_userid [-u your_userid]
This command signs a plaintext file with your signature, using your
secret key, and then encrypts it with the recipient's public key.

pgp -c textfile
This command encrypts a plaintext file using conventional single-key
cryptography. This is most useful only for storing files that you will
later retrieve.

Decryption Commands

pgp ciphertextfile [-o plaintextfile]
This command decrypts an encrypted file, or checks the signature in-
tegrity of a signed file.

pgp -e textfile userid1 userid2 userid3
This command encrypts a message that can be decrypted by any one of
any number of recipients.

Key Management Commands

pgp -kg
This command generates your own unique public/secret key pair.

pgp -ka keyfile [keyring]
This command add a public or secret key to your public or secret
"keyring."

pgp -kx userid keyfile [keyring], or
pgp -kxa userid keyfile [keyring]
These commands extract (copies) a specific key from your public or
secret keyring.

pgp -kv[v] [userid] [keyring]
This command allows you to view the contents of your public keyring.

pgp -kvc [userid] [keyring]
This command allows you to view the "fingerprint" of a public key,
useful if you want to verify it over the telephone with its owner.

pgp -kc [userid] [keyring]
This command allows you to view the contents of your public keyring,
and check the keys' certifying signatures.

pgp -ke userid [secret keyring]
This command allows you to edit the userid or pass phrase for your
secret key.

pgp -ke userid [public keyring]
This command allows you to edit the "trust" parameters for a public
key.

pgp -kr userid [keyring]
This command removes a key or a userid from your public keyring.

pgp -ks her_userid [-u your_userid] [keyring]
This command allows you to sign and certify someone else's public key
on your public keyring.

pgp -krs userid [keyring]
This command allows you to remove selected signatures from a userid on
a keyring.

pgp -kd your_userid
This command allows you to permanently revoke your own key, issuing a
Key Revocation Certificate for transmission to other PGP users.

pgp -kd userid
This command allows you to disable or re-enable a public key on your
own public keyring.

If any of this is too esoteric for you, look around the net (the news-
group "alt.security.pgp" is a good place to start) for software that
provides a Windows or DOS front end. This takes much of the learning
and difficulty out of the process of using PGP for all your communi-
cations.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Step Two: Procedure for getting a copy of PGP, the de facto standard
for file encryption both on the Internet and within stand-alone com-
puters. (Briefly put, you do it by using Anonymous FTP to connect
with "net-dist.mit.edu/pub/PGP," and then downloading the README file
to obtain more detailed instructions.)

Those who want more detailed guidance can buy the recently released
book: "The Official PGP User's Guide," by Philip R. Zimmerman (The
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, $14.95).

New Privacy Survey Under Way

A major financial services corporation has commissioned Literal Re-
search to gather opinions about consumer privacy for transactions
over the Internet.

Those of who who'd like to make their opinions a part of this survey
can answer the questions directly on the World Wide Web. The location
is http://www.literal.net/research. Here's a rundown of what you'll
find:

Literal Research: Internet Transactions

Many efforts are currently underway to enable electronic commerce
over the Internet. Most of these efforts will mimic the current bank-
ing models for cash, credit, debit and checking. These payment
vehicles will be used to purchase products and services electroni-
cally.

Some consider transaction security and privacy essential to the
successful implementation of electronic commerce. The goal of this
survey is to identify consumer preferences as they relate to privacy
for payment options over the Internet.

1. How interested are you in making purchases over the Internet?
   (No opinion, very much, somewhat, not at all.)

2. Would you be making purchases on the Internet for your?
   (Personal use, Business use, Both.)

3. What types of goods or services would you be interested in pur-
   chasing over the Internet? (Check all that apply: consumer elec-
   tronics, computer equipment, commercial software, shareware,
   information, books, music, other.)

4. Would you use a credit card to make purchases over the Internet?
   (No opinion, often, sometimes, never.)

5. Would you use a debit card to make purchases over the Internet?
   (No opinion, often, sometimes, never.)

6. Would you use electronic cash to make purchases over the Internet?
   (No opinion, often, sometimes, never.)

7. Do you believe that encryption enhances the security of your
   transactions over the Internet? (No opinion, yes, possibly, no.)

8. Do you believe that encryption protects the privacy of your trans-
   actions over the Internet? (No opinion, yes, possibly, no.)

9. For each of the encrypted payment options below, rank order the
   factors that would influence your decision to use that payment
   option over the Internet:

Encrypted credit cards (select each answer only once):

* Size of the purchase
* Stores prefer credit cards
* Rewards for use of card
* Can choose to delay bill payment

Encrypted debit cards (select each answer only once):

* Direct access to bank account
* Stores prefer debit card
* Convenient for small purchases
* Gives a sense of control over finances

Encrypted electronic cash (select each answer only once):

* Bank cannot trace my purchases
* Stores prefer electronic cash
* Convenient for small purchases
* Gives a sense of control over finances

10. Check the following statements that you believe to be true:

__I believe my credit or debit card company would disclose my pur-
  chase records without my consent.
--I believe my credit or debit card company would disclose my pur-
  chase records to government authorities.
--I believe my credit or debit card company would provide information
  about purchases to merchants.
--I believe my credit or debit card statement would be seen by my
  spouse, family members,or employer.
--I do not want my credit or debit card company to have any knowledge
  of my purchases

Any comments? Mail your completed form to "info@literal.net".

Literal Research says the information gathered will play an important
role in shaping new products and services to be provided across the
Internet.

There's Security In Groupware Systems

If you and I are exchanging messages, we have two concerns on our mind.
First, we want to send each other messages that no one else can read.
Second, we want to be sure the messages we receive from each other
have not been altered or read by others enroute.

In computer terms, these features are often called "security" or
"privacy," and "authentication" or "non-repudiation." Although these
concepts come into play primarily for the messages we exchange over
networks, it's obvious that maintaining any level of privacy within
our e-mail messages requires that we extend the same degree of privacy
to the content of our e-mail when it's in the form of files we create
or receive, and then store.

If we don't, our situation is a lot like putting our money in a heavy-
duty strong-box while leaving the combination or the key in plain
sight!

Although these concepts are simple and similar for all computer users,
the details of how you actually achieve and maintain privacy and
security depends a great deal on the network, e-mail, and computer
environment in which you are working.

In today's market, the fast-growing collection of groupware products
tend to be a little more forward-looking than the networks on which
they operate.

Based on my recent conversations with vendor representatives and users
in the field, here are descriptions of how Lotus Notes and Novell
GroupWise handle these important privacy and authentication issues.
 

Security In Lotus Notes

Notes uses selective access and data encryption capabilities to allow
users to send private messages conveniently across a network, and
also provides a measure of access control at the server level,
allowing me to put in a document only you can read.

One of the nicest features about Notes' access control and file
encryption is that it operates on partial as well as complete files.
In practice, this means a complex document can be set up with para-
graphs or sections having differential security. We can all read the
first paragraph, for example, but only Joe can read the second para-
graph, only Sally can read the third paragraph, and only Ishmael can
read the fourth paragraph.

Typically, Notes file names are left openly available, but the con-
tents are encrypted so only those you want to have access can actually
view the contents. Unauthorized users who open the file see the
blocked material as encrypted text, which can show up as white space
or can even disappear entirely for those not entitled to see it.

A "signature" feature which is part of every Notes file provides in-
controvertible proof of who actually created it.

While these features are all valuable and important, the understanding
and practical steps necessary to accomplish all this can be a little
complicated for some users to master.

Let's start with document protection. Your first step in Notes is to
create a key you'll use to open and close the documents you want to
store privately. If you wish, you can give your key to other people,
and all of you can use it to encrypt and decrypt the same documents
within the Notes system.

When you want to send a private message, you switch to Notes' built in
public-key encryption system. Prior to sending a message, you click on
a box labeled "sign and seal." This uses your private RSA-technology
encryption key to encode a small part of your message, creating a CRC-
like value for the document that, upon receipt, Notes will use to
prove the message is really from you.

Every field in a Notes message has flags that accompany it, and you
can set these flags to tell the system which parts of the message are
included in the "sign and seal" process. The system uses the same
flags to indicate which parts of the message are to be encrypted, as
well.

It's important to be sure you set the flags properly for every field
you want to get signed and/ or encrypted, because Notes might not warn
you if some of the flags are not set as you want them to be.

The flags are generally transparent to the user. They are a built-in
component of Notes' "form building" capability that allows users to
specify which parts of all the new documents created on the basis of a
single template will be encrypted and/or signed. Once you set up the
template, or select a preprogrammed template you like, you need never
again bother to specify the encryption and signature functions.

When it's time to e-mail a Notes message, look within the dialog box
for an option to do the encryption, or not. As a practical matter,
there's no problem calling for as much encryption as you wish when
sending messages to another Notes user. But when you're sending e-mail
to another network or across the Internet--in other words, through a
mail messaging gateway--certain address fields must be left in the
clear.

Even so, the encrypted materials in your e-mail message can be dis-
carded or lost depending on how each gateway treats it. This is
because today there are no standards for how these gateways should
treat encrypted information that--like Notes' encrypted material--
contains the extended character set, which uses about twice as many
characters as the basic ASCII character set that e-mail systems are
presently able to handle.

Lotus says Notes doesn't yet produce encrypted files that are suitable
for Internet e-mail because the company is trying to keep system as
simple as possible for users. However, most experts agree that within
5 years some form of standards will be set for the extended character
set and Notes will then be able to e-mail encrypted files anywhere on
the Internet.

In addition to access control and selective encryption, Notes includes
a third encryption process: the "Secure Channel." This means all the
traffic between two users are encrypted at the link level of the
network protocol. This third level of protection doesn't protect your
messages from being read by others Notes users at the destination
site, but it does allow for the secure transfer of protected messages
across the Internet.

To sum up, then: A Notes document could be kept private from anyone
without the proper access to that file. The document can also be set
up to encrypt specific portions of its contents and make them available
only to a sub-group of Notes users with the authorization to read the
file. And the entire document can be encrypted again using the "Secure
Channel" feature, for transmission across the Internet to another
Notes system.

If you create a document with the encryption flags set, the decryption
process will be automatic for all authorized users. Unauthorized users
who try to view that document will instead see a message that the
document is encrypted and they don't have the key required to see it.

If you want to further encrypt the document for a narrower group of
Notes users, you must create an encryption key and give it only to the
recipients you want to be able to read the file. In an e-mail envi-
ronment, of course, you can simply use the recipient's public key to
do the encryption.

Notes creates the public and private keys automatically, whenever a
new user is introduced to the system. The public key is automatically
placed into the Notes' public key file, and the private key goes into
the new users' own Notes "ID" file.

After a Notes user creates a new single key for document encryption,
it's easy to send it to other users. They place it into their ID files
so Notes automatically decrypts files encrypted with that key whenever
that user tries to view them.

As with most key-based encryption system, when a key is compromised,
the user simply creates and distributes new keys. But it's necessary
to write what Notes calls an "Agent Script" (but the rest of us call a
macro) to decrypt all the documents that used the old key and to re-
encrypt them using the new key that replaces it.

Lotus representatives are cagey about the bit-length of the keys that
Notes uses, but they did acknowledge that the overseas version of
Notes users 40-bit keys on single key encryption (the length of its
public keys is not for release). Domestic versions of Notes use a DES-
like single key system for document encryption, and a 512 bit key for
public/private key encrypted e-mail messages.
 

Security In Novell's GroupWise

GroupWise is an enterprise-wide electronic messaging system with
built-in calendaring, task management, and other advanced features
that greatly facilitate working in groups.

The most notable feature of GroupWise's privacy and security is that
the software fully encrypts all messages, whether stored locally or
transported through the system. The user need do nothing to encrypt or
decrypt any information in the fully-automatic system. Once you are
authenticated by the system, you can scan all the messages to which
you have access.

Users are authenticated whenever they log on to the network. For
situations where this level of security is not sufficient, GroupWise
can also insist on a second level of authentication. Since the system
already knows who you are--you logged onto the network, didn't you--it
asks only for a second password this time around.

Most of this authorization is automatic and transparent, but GroupWise
offers a "proxy" function that lets someone else, such as your admini-
strative assistant or co-worker, access one, two, three, or all four
of the message types you receive. This enables you to delegate certain
tasks or responsibilities to others, or keep work flowing even when
you're not on the system.

GroupWise message types include:

1) e-mail messages,

2) appointment messages, which are like e-mail, but have attributes
   that include a date, a time, and a location, and which automati-
   cally post themselves into the GroupWise calendar,

3) task messages, which are much like a "to do" item on a calendar,
   automatically showing up in your task list, with priorities set by
   yourself or whoever sent them to you, and

4) note messages, which are very much like e-mail but are attached to
   a certain date on the calendar.

It is also possible for a user to give or deny access to messages
marked as "private" by either the sender or the recipient.

One interesting facet of this "privacy" setting is that GroupWise can
mark as private some or all of the messages you receive. It does this
by referring to privacy rules you establish. For example, you can have
all messages from your boss automatically marked "private." This would
exclude them from access by anyone to whom you didn't give specific
access privileges.

Because these privacy rules are executed by GroupWise's remote server,
messages that conform to your rules are delivered to you already
marked "private."

GroupWise also offers two security capabilities above and beyond those
of its e-mail system:

1) Public/private key encryption for electronic forms. With this capa-
   bility, a form you fill in electronically can be signed and tamper-
   sealed against modification. This allows users to submit such
   critical information as payroll change notices or accounts payable
   authorizations over the network, and be sure no one else can change
   it.

2) Access restriction for documents. GroupWise allows for a public
   setting (anyone can read and change it), a semi-private setting
   (anyone can read it but only the originator can change it) and a
   private setting (only the originator can even set the document, let
   alone read or change it).

(An extended security feature precludes any "back door" access outside
of GroupWise by handling the access granting and revoking process
within the entire Netware environment. Unauthorized users can't even
see that a private file exists in a normal file list.)

There are two e-mail message modes within GroupWise: a "pass through"
mode can be set up when GroupWise software is used on both ends of the
connection. In this mode, the system maintains full security through-
out the entire e-mail transfer process. When GroupWise exists on only
one end of the connection, the software automatically removes its
proprietary encryption before it sends an e-mail message off the
system.

Of course, if you're not satisfied with the built-in security capa-
bilities of Notes, GroupWise, or any other software within your com-
puter system, it's nearly always possible to rely on a good encryption
program, like PGP. To do this, you would simply create a message, exit
your e-mail system to encode it, then re-enter the system to send it
across the network. You'd go through the same procedure in reverse for
messages you receive.

But it's a darn sight more convenient when your e-mail system has pri-
vacy and authentication built right in.
 
 

Given that we're focused on practical, cost-effective techniques for
maintaining privacy and security that's sufficient for ordinary acts
of a personal or legal business nature, I'll try to provide a break-
down of some steps you might want to take to achieve an appropriate
level of privacy and security.

Let's begin with some of the simpler concerns:

Telephone Privacy

Nautilus is a program that lets you enjoy encrypted voice telephone
conversations with other people. There's no special equipment re-
quired. All you need is a personal computer (386/25 or faster PC with
Soundblaster compatible sound board, or Sun Sparcstation) and a high-
speed modem. Speech quality is acceptable at 9600 bps and reasonably
good at 14.4kbps. Currently, the system won't work at slower modem
speeds.

Nautilus is the first program of this type that I know of to be dis-
tributed for free with its source code. A few similar commercial
programs have been distributed without source code. But this renders
independent examination of the quality of security they provide
totally impossible.

Basically, Nautilus uses your computer's audio hardware to digitize
and play back your speech using a proprietary speech compression rou-
tine included with the program. It encrypts the compressed speech and
transmits the data through your modem and across the Internet to the
other person's computer. At present, the program is half-duplex; you
must hit a key to switch between talking and listening. But full-
duplex is said to be in the works.

Nautilus generates its encryption key from a shared secret passphrase
that you and the other person choose. Because Nautilus does not
incorporate any form of public key cryptography, you must communicate
this passphrase by some other secure means before you make your call.

What is Nautilus?

Nautilus is a program which allows two parties to hold a secure voice conversation. Released in May of 1995, it ran on
ordinary phone lines using a pair of modems (one at each end). Version 1.5a added the ability to work over TCP/IP networks
including the Internet (Unix versions only). Version 1.6a release was released in June of 1997, and was primarilly a bug fix
release. Version 1.7a has just been released (September, 1998). In addition to some minor bug fixes, it adds support for 32-bit
Microsoft Windows platforms including Windows 95, 98, and NT.

Information on where to obtain the latest release is available in the next section.

For more detailed information on the functionality and operation of Nautilus, check out the manual (needs updating). Please
read the system requirements section before contacting the developers with problems. If you have questions or comments about
Nautilus that are not answered in the manual, you may contact the developers by sending mail to the Nautilus developers list..
 
 

Where can I get Nautilus?

Please be advised that the US Department of Commerce considers the encryption contained in Nautilus to be regulated under
the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) Commerce Control List (CCL) and may not be legally exportable from the USA
without specific permission from the Bureau of Export Administration (BXA). Such regulation was the responsibility of the US
Department of State's Arms Export Control Act (AECA) & US Munitions List (USML) of the International Traffic in Arms
Regulation (ITAR) until the November 15, 1996 Executive Order #13026 of President Clinton.

However, the landmark Federal Court of California ruling of Bernstein vs. US Department of State has upheld the right of US
citizens to freely publish cryptographic software they have authored via the internet.

This site has recently been set up to allow residents of the United States and Canada the ability to download Version 1.7a of
Nautilus. Click here to download Version 1.7a.

Previous version of Nautilus appear to be available from the following sites around the world:

 ftp://ftp.demon.net/pub/mirrors/crypto/misc/nautilus-1.5a.tar.gz
 ftp://ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/misc/nautilus-1.5a.tar.gz
 ftp://ftp.auscert.org.au/pub/coast/mirrors/ftp.master.pgp.net/crypto/misc/nautilus-1.5a.tar.gz
 ftp://ftp.franken.de/pub/crypt/misc/nautilus-1.5a.tar.gz
 ftp://ftp.um.es/mirror/ftp.replay.com/voice/nautilus-1.5a.tar.gz
 ftp://ftp.lander.es/pub/crypt/misc/nautilus-1.5a.tar.gz
 ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/crypt/utilities/phone/nautilus-1.5a.tar.gz
 

Note that we have taken every reasonable precaution to assure that Nautilus was not exported. However, it appears that one or
more persons unknown to us have exported Nautilus (in violation of US federal regulation). We intend to continue to abide by
the letter of US law in this matter; however we will list non-US ftp sites from which Nautilus may be obtained as a public
service.
 
 

Here are some URLs that contain related information that may be of interest:

     Report reveals that thousands of innocent people may have been illegally monitored in violation of federal law
     For more information on the current state of cryptography, check out www.crypto.com.
     The Electronic Frontier Foundation defends our right to privacy and freedom of expression on the Internet.
     The Internet Privacy Coalition promotes privacy and security on the Internet through the use of strong encryption.

For more information, or to contact the developers, send email to
nautilus@lila.com.

Computer File Privacy

According to Andre Bacard, who wrote The Computer Privacy Handbook: A
Practical Guide to E-Mail Encryption, Data Protection, and PGP Privacy
Software, "very few people use an encryption system, even though they
should. In fact, even encryption software people don't always use one."

This is not only a shame, it's a downright shame because encryption is
so easy to use. (See "Pretty Good Privacy," Microtimes, May 1, 1995
for an explanation of just how easy it can be.)

To begin with, Bacard counsels that--once you have created and edited
a file to your liking--you encrypt it with both your intended re-
cipient's public key and your own.

Using PGP, for example, you simply specify two public keys instead of
one before you give the command to encrypt the file. The encryption
still takes place in a single pass, and takes no more time than if you
had encrypted the file only for your recipient.

Once the file is encrypted, you can and should keep a copy of this
encrypted file on your own computer. Whenever you want to read it, you
can decrypt it with your own private key. In the meantime, no one but
you and your intended recipient can read what you've written.

Once you've converted your file to encrypted form, be sure to use some
form of "disk wiping" utility software--like the ones you get with
Norton Utilities or Central Point Software--to thoroughly erase both
the original (clear text) version of your file, and later any clear
text copies you make when you decrypt the file to review what you've
written.

As a practical matter, Bacard believes, files longer than about 50K
are tedious to send via e-mail. For a longer file, it's often practi-
cal to put it on a disk and send or carry the disk to your intended

recipient. As long as the file is properly encrypted, the actual
channel you use--e-mail, sneaker-net, or the U.S. Post Office--is
immaterial. Since no one can read the file, your only concern is that
it actually arrives.

For a little extra security, you can digitally "sign" the file so your
recipient can be certain it remains as you sent it, regardless of
whether or not it has been intercepted en route.

Next month: A discussion of digital signatures--are they legally
valid? Also, a continuation of our quest for privacy through the use
of anonymous remailers, and more!

Are Encrypted Signatures Legally Valid ?

No one suggests that privacy doesn't matter. But that's no guarantee
it's easily obtainable.

In this space our slant on the topic--maintaining privacy for Level
One activities (trying to arrange a private one-time meeting), for
Level Two activities (trying to manage a private ongoing relationship)
and for Level Three activities (conducting normal, legal business
affairs with privacy)--can reasonably be understood to require pro-
tection for all the information we store on our computers and exchange
with others.

As we've discussed, there are several good methods for protecting such
files not only from prying eyes, but from tampering by unauthorized
persons either while they're on your computer or while they're in
transit to another person.

But as always, computer technology is leaping far ahead of most other
social factors, including both our day-to-day attitudes and laws
regarding privacy. For example, laws covering theft of property had
to be amended recently to cover theft of computerized information,
laws covering the validity of signatures had to be amended to cover
facsimile transmission of signatures.

That's why it's perfectly reasonable and practical to ask whether a
digital signature--thoroughly encoded by means of Pretty Good Privacy
or another security system and thus able to be 100% authenticated when
it arrives at its destination--actually counts as a legal signature.

According to Jeffrey W. Rose, an attorney in Orange County, CA, whose
practice covers intellectual property and high-technology issues,
including copyright and trademark litigation, licensing and other
transactional matters, and who also serves as the chairman for the
Technology Law Section for the Orange County Bar Association, the
answer to this question is a possible "Yes."

"In most circumstances," says Rose, "an e-mail signature would be
valid. But not necessarily so."

Here's more detail on this important issue:

As long as a contract is not required to be in writing, an e-mail
acceptance carries as much weight as any other acceptance, without
regard to whether it contains a signature and/or is encrypted. The
primary question is simply whether the terms of the contract have
been accepted or consented to by both parties. The only requirements
for valid consent are that it be free, mutual and communicated by each
party to one another. Under this standard interpretation of existing
law, any communication of consent would bind the person to the terms
of the contract, whether the consent be communicated by e-mail, snail
mail, voice mail or orally in some face-to-face situation.

Encryption of an e-mail signature would come into play only if the
signing party later claimed mistake or otherwise tried to rescind the
contract. Evidence that the signature had been sent by data-encrypted
e-mail, with all that these technologies entail, would make it hard
for the party to claim that he or she did not send the message.

A second area of the law relates to contracts required to be in
writing. Documents governed by the Uniform Commercial Code, for
example, would be binding if agreed to by means of an e-mail signature.
UCC Section 3401(b) states that "A signature may be made (1) manually
or by means of a device or machine, and (2) by the use of any name,
including a trade or assumed name, or by a word mark, or symbol exe-
cuted or adopted by a person with a present intention to authenticate
a writing."

In other words, a person attaching an encrypted or unencrypted signa-
ture to an agreement or offer would thus be bound by the terms of that
offer, so long as he intended the electronic signature to represent
his acceptance or consent. Each person would be construed to have
effectively adopted the electronic version as his signature just as if
he had put pen to paper.

The encryption again would primarily serve to make it more difficult
for the party to deny that he or she has previously agreed to the
contract.

However, contracts required to be in writing by the Statute of Frauds
present a more difficult issue. Within California, at least, the
statute (Cal. Civil Code Section 1624) states that certain contracts
are invalid "unless they, or some note or memorandum thereof, are in
writing and subscribed by the party to be charged or the party's
agent."

These contracts include, among other things, (a) any agreement that is
not to be performed within one year of its making, (b) a promise to
answer for the debt of another (i.e. a guarantee), (c) agreements
relating to leases of real property for more than one year as well as
agreements for the sale of real property or any interest therein, (e)
agreements hiring agents or brokers to sell real property and (f)
agreements or commitments to loan more than $100,000 for purposes
other than personal or household purposes by a party in the business
of lending or arranging for credit.

The question of whether or not an encrypted signature is valid for
these types of transactions gets interesting based on at least three
factors.

First, a subscription can include a "mark." The definition of mark,
however, requires that a third party "witness" the mark and supply his
own "written" signature as a witness. In addition, the use of a mark
appears to be limited to situations where the party cannot write.

Second, the code also provides rules to be followed in proving the
validity of a signature, should it come into question. These rules,
too, seem to presume that the signature is hand written. They include
techniques such as calling witnesses to the execution of the signature,
and comparing the signature to known samples of the party's hand-
writing.

Third, the Statute of Frauds has most recently been interpreted fairly
strictly, meaning that digital signatures, too new to have been con-
templated when the law was written, may not be covered by established
statutes.

Each of these factors would seem to indicate that a hand written, or
"wet," signature is required for a contract to a valid. Fortunately
(or unfortunately, depending on your point of view), case law and
other factors contradict these standards.

For example, telexes containing printed signatures have been found
sufficient to make a contract binding. The "adoption" of a prior
signature has also been found sufficient in cases governed by the UCC.
The issue centers on what the intent of the party was in placing the
mark and in the circumstances of the negotiations.

An even more compelling justification for finding that a digitally
encrypted signature would be binding is based upon an exception (or
two, depending on the Court) to the Statute.

Generally, the Courts will not permit a party to perpetrate a fraud
based upon the use of the Statute. Accordingly, if a party takes steps
to lead another to believe that there is a binding contract and the
second party then performs certain acts because he believes a valid
contract does exist, the first party may not then invoke the Statute
to claim the contract is not a valid one.

In other words, if you were to accept an e-mail signature on a con-
tract as valid, and then do your part to fulfill that contract, the
other party would be prevented by the Courts from trying to ignore his
or her obligations under the contract, particularly after enjoying the
benefits of what you had done as a result of your belief in the
contract's validity. These arguments are usually referred to as the
fraud exception and/or "estoppel."

As a practical matter, however, Rose's advice to a client would be to
not rely on e-mail signatures too much where the Statute applies. The
current bias is generally that if you enter into a contract subject to
the Statute of Frauds, you should make sure that all formalities are
followed and should execute a formal agreement. The Courts have gone
to great lengths to find all of the criteria satisfied based on any
type of writing. These determinations, however, have been very fact
specific.

If detailed negotiations were documented and the circumstances indi-
cated that e-mail communications between you and the other party were
commonplace or at least not extraordinary, there's not much reason to
worry. It would be very hard for the other party to deny the fact that
he or she had intentionally reached an agreement with you.

On the other hand, if the communications are one-sided or there is no
real explanation for the use of a digitally encoded signature in place
of a regular handwritten one, a Court might decide the other way.

In today's practical world, therefore, it remains easier and more cer-
tain to follow up an e-mail acceptance with 1) an exchange of hard
copies, including handwritten signatures, or 2) a very clear CYA
letter (or e-mail) to establish that the e-mail and digitally encoded
signature were really intended as complete acceptance and execution,
especially when the other alternative is to to take the disputed
matter to Court and try to win based upon fairness arguments.

To summarize: Yes an e-mail signature would be binding in most cir-
cumstances. The encryption would add to the signature's validity
because in most circumstances it would add weight to the actions of
the parties and display a greater level of contemplation and intent.
It would also be important evidence to help prevent a party from
backing out of a contract or claiming mistake.

However, at the present moment there does not appear to be anything in
the law or in Court decisions that would give greater weight to an
encoded e-mail signature than to a non-encoded one.

The California legislature is currently considering a bill (A.B. 1577)
regarding digital signatures and a means for verifying their authen-
ticity via encryption. Utah and Washington have also considered
similar bills (S.B. 82 in Utah--went into effect May 1, 1995, and S.B.
5959 in Washington, not yet effective at the time of this article).

The Utah bill was first to the plate, being introduced on February 24,
1995. California followed suit with a copycat bill on February 27,
1995, with Washington introducing similar legislation in March, 1995.

The California bill has undergone extensive amendments, to date, and
now appears headed toward being limited to the use of digital signa-
tures in transactions with the state itself. The Utah bill is broader.
Both bills anticipate implementation by means of the use of encryp-
tion to verify authenticity and set up rebuttable presumptions.

Utah will apparently rely on public key encryption while California
may allow other, as yet uninvented, forms of encryption to also be
used. No word is yet available on the contents of the Washington bill.
If you'd like to get more information directly from Attorney Jeff
Rose, you can e-mail contact him at 75501.2464@compuserve.com, or
telephone him at 714-754-7400.

Anonymous Remailers

One of the best ways to maintain privacy on the Internet has long been
to make use of what are called "anonymous remailers." These computers
are set up and maintained specifically to provide a semi-secure
"front" designed to help you maintain your privacy.

An anonymous remailer essentially strips out all the identifying codes
from your e-mail messages, codes that might let an unwanted observer
identify who you are or from where you're operating.

When you send your first message to the server, it automatically
creates a new identity for you, and sends you a message telling you
the new ID. From then on, any messages you send into the remailer are
forwarded to the recipient with this ID instead of your own.

When someone replies to one of your messages, it reaches you only
through the anonymous remailer, which restores the identifying codes
for your real return address, and forwards the message back to you.

At least, that's what happens in theory. In practice, however, accor-
ding to Andre Bacard, author of The Computer Privacy Handbook: A
Practical Guide to E-Mail Encryption, Data Protection, and PGP Privacy
Software (Peachpit Press), "some anonymous remailers are safe and some
aren't. The most commonly-used remailer, for example, called
"anon.penet.fi" and located in Finland, is no longer considered com-
pletely safe."

One obvious source of privacy compromises with anonymous remailers is
that you can't be sure of the personal integrity of every administra-
tor who runs one. Your privacy depends very directly on them, and you
probably don't know who they are.

Another source is "electronic mail failures." In some cases, network
mail routers make mistakes, try shortcuts to the destination site or
do other things that can cause your e-mail to reach its final desti-
nation without ever passing through the anonymous remailer. Also, if
your return address bounces because the network's name server is down,
or configurations are temporarily out of whack, or some other reason,
postmasters along the network route might get error messages--and
perhaps even your full message--showing your true identity.

Despite these dangers, you may want to explore the use of anonymous
remailers. To help you, here is a brief list. You can get a more com-
plete list by sending an e-mail message to:
               "remailer-list@kiwi.cs.berkeley.edu":

                        remail@vox.xs4all.nl

                        anon@vox.hacktic.nl

                     remail@extropia.wimsey.com

                      hfinney@shell.portal.com

                       hal@alumni.caltech.edu

                       nowhere@bsu-cs.bsu.edu

                     remailer@csua.berkeley.edu

                     remailer@utopia.hacktic.nl

                       mixmaster@obscura.com

                     mixmaster@vishnu.alias.net

                        remailer@replay.com

                       remailer@armadillo.com

Before using any anonymous remailer, get detailed instructions on how
to work it. Generally, you can do this by sending a message to "help"
at the anonymous remailer's domain name.
 
 

Hack Attack

One concern is the danger of having your personal computer "hacked
into" next time you're connected to the Internet. After consulting
with various experts, I've concluded this is theoretically possible.
We all know your e-mail is like an open book to even casual hackers.
Thousands of e-mail messages are randomly captured and read by un-
authorized users every day as they flash through relatively unpro-
tected nodes on the Internet.

If you became a special target, however, it would be fairly easy to do
more. For example, a knowledgeable "spy" could set up a computer pro-
gram to lie in wait for your next dial-in, and have it immediately
begin scanning and copying your hard-disk for files that seem inter-
esting or important.

Your tax returns, bank and stock-trading account numbers, and other
such important information would be obvious targets for capture from
disk files. Combined with other publicly available information, they
would give an intruder easy access to your money, your credit, and
more.

You don't even need a computer for this. For example, anyone who can
find out your name, address, and phone number, and can then put these
together with your social security and bank- or trading-account num-
bers has a good chance of pretending to be you over the telephone and
moving your resources around in ways you might not like. (You don't
need a computer, but using one sure makes the work easier.)

Best Protection: Sever The Connection

That's why most large-scale organizations connected to the Internet
try to implement what are generically known as "fire walls." Built
from any combination of various safe-guards and protections against
unauthorized access, these work by strictly limiting the connections
between computers that contain private information and computers that
actually communicate with the outside world.

If you're concerned about such breaches of privacy and can't afford a
fire wall arrangement, your best bet is not to keep your critical data
on your hard drive. Instead, move it to a floppy you can remove from
the computer (and possibly store in safe) when you're not using it.
Removable hard drives provide the same protection for larger quanti-
ties of data.

Some security experts, however, say you don't really need protection.
The chances of a hacker attacking your computer for private informa-
tion is very remote. That's because vast majority of computer crooks
play the odds. They go for large-scale systems at banks, brokerage
houses, retailers, and--yes--even Internet access providers likely to
have files containing many valid credit card numbers and other finan-
cial information.

Any Remedies? One interesting aspect of all this, for me, is that the
very same computers creating such opportunities for massive compro-
mises in our financial privacy may also hold the key to better privacy
and data protection. For example, shopping online is an easy way to
leave a trail of financial information, personal habits, and private
preferences. As soon as you buy those ________ (fill in the blank), a
thousand people will know it. But new technology now promises to offer
greater protection for individuals who don't want to be widely known.

Electronic money, for instance, is intended to function as anonymously
as cash, but to be acceptable through computer networks where paper
money cannot possibly go.
 
 

PGP Goes Telephonic

The developers of PGP are in the process of taking the next step.
They're beta-testing a piece of software called "PGPfone" or
Pretty Good Privacy Phone. Like Nautilus and one or two others, PGPfone
turns your desktop or notebook computer into a secure telephone.

Using both speech compression and encryption, PGPfone tries to offer
real-time secure telephone services over any telephone line--including
the one you use to connect to the Internet.

Basically, PGPfone takes your voice from a microphone built into your
computer and transfers it through a modem to the computer network, and
then back through another modem to the computer of the person at the
other end. Of course, both parties must be using the same software for
the telephone system to work.

In practice, PGPfone is intended to work and feel very much like a
regular telephone. To run the software, you need modem operating at
14.4 Kbps V.32bis or 28.8 Kbps V.34. You also need either an Apple
Macintosh with a 25MHz 68LC040 processor or a PowerPC running System
7.1 or higher, plus Thread Manager 2.0.1 and Sound Manager 3.0 (both
available from Apple's FTP sites).

Zimmerman and company will soon release a version of PGPfone for
multimedia PCs. This will require a 66 MHz 486 or Pentium chip, with
Windows 95 or NT, and a sound card fitted with a microphone and
speakers or headphones.

The first time you run PGPfone, it creates a "preferences" file to
store user-changeable defaults and your own preferred settings. Most
of the default preferences will work well enough for you to get
started, and you can always modify them later. The preferences
include simple basics:

* PGPfone wants you to specify the port your modem is using, your
  maximum modem speed, and your port's speed setting.

* The "Wait for call" option can be turned off so that PGPfone and
  other applications using the modem won't always conflict.

* A critical setting is the "modem init string." It's important that
  you get this right, otherwise the modem may try to do its own
  compression and error correction, which will throw PGPfone off its
  stride and interfere with its operation.

* PGPfone can operate in either "full" or "half" duplex. Half duplex
  is like old-time radio transmissions. One party talks, the other
  listens. Then the talker says "over" and the two switch roles.
  During "half duplex" conversations, the software displays a button
  which changes between "push to talk" and "push to listen" when you
  press it.

Full duplex is what you get on normal telephones. Both parties can
talk and listen at the same time. In effect, there are two one-way
connections instead of only one, so you don't need--and won't see--the
"talk" and "listen" option button.

Unfortunately, running a "full duplex" conversation through PGPfone
requires that both parties have enough computing power to handle
speech compression in both directions at once. If one party's computer
can't handle the extra computations, both parties must select "half
duplex."

Multimedia PCs with Soundblaster cards are generally capable of
running only in half-duplex mode, even with Pentium processors. Most
Macintosh sound hardware, on the other hand, can work in "full duplex"
mode under most circumstances.

Interestingly, using "full duplex" also commits you to headphone
arrangement, because if you have the sound coming out over speakers,
the sound goes back into the open microphone and creates that high-
pitched whine called "feedback." It's compounded by echoes of your
voices ricocheting endlessly down the pipeline between you.

When finally released, PGPfone will be equally capable of working over
modem and standard telephone lines, AppleTalk, and Internet connections.
The process of making the call is fairly straightforward. Simply enter
the telephone number and click on the "Dial" button. PGPfone will dial
out through the modem. On the other end of the connection it expects
to find another modem and computer system with PGPfone already up and
running.

When the other party answers, the two software systems will negotiate
to agree on an encryption algorithm, a key, full or half duplex, and a
compression algorithm for that conversation. Once this is completed--
there's no need for you to do anything except wait a few seconds--you
can start talking.

When you're done, click on the "Hangup" button and the computers
handle the disconnection. If you know your phone will be ringing, set
PGPfone to "wait for a call." Now when the phone rings, the "Dial"
button switches to read "Answer." Click on it, and PGPfone establishes
a connection with the computer running PGPfone at the other end.

One very interesting capability is switching from normal telephone
calls to PGPfone calls without hanging up. To do this, you must be
calling on the same line that your computer uses for modem work. Each
party clicks on the button that tells PGPfone to behave as though it
made--or received--the present telephone call. The "caller" goes
first. He or she presses the Control key and clicks on the "Dial"
button, which has switched to read "Originate." The "callee" then hits
his Control key and clicks on the "Dial" button, which now reads
"Answer." Both parties can now hang up their telephones and switch to
their computer headsets and microphones.

But how can they--or you--be sure the call is secure? PGPfone provides
a "signature checking" capability in a very interesting way. When the
call is first begun, the software at each end displays some test
words (such as: aardvark, backfield, autopsy, and bottomless) for you
to read to the person at the other end, and for him to read to you. If
the voice sounds like the person you think you're talking to, and the
words he or she is reading are the same words you see on your screen,
PGPfone has created a secure connection no one else can tap.

Zimmerman has cleverly decided on this "signature checking" capability
to detect the only credible threat to PGPfone security: what he calls
a ""man-in-the-middle" attack. Basically, this results when an un-
suspected "spy" taps a telephone line with a computer and intercepts
not just your telephone calls, but your modem calls. Thus, instead of
you connecting via computers directly to your friend or coworker,
you're connected to the spy's computer, which is also connected to
your friend or co-worker. Ordinarily, you couldn't detect this. But
since PGPfone selects its own authentication words for each connection,
having two connections between you and your co-worker instead of one
creates a situation where there's almost no chance the same authen-
tication words will be displayed for both connections. You'll read
different words to each other, and you'll know the connection is not
secure.

The Intrigue Of Cyber-Privacy - Using PGP Public Keyservers

Generally acknowledged as the most effective cryptographic program now
widely available to average users, PGP is only as effective as you
allow it to be. That is, if you don't encrypt your e-mail and the
files on your disk, PGP won't help you much.

Fortunately, it's fairly easy to make frequent use of PGP. Here are
some tips to help you make PGP a part of your daily routine:

Assuming you have a valid copy of PGP, you're limited in getting much
benefit from it unless you take the next step: using one of the widely
available PGP "public key servers."

These computers are set up primarily to facilitate the exchange of
public encryption keys among people who want others to send them files
in PGP-encrypted code. Generally, the PGP key servers are not sup-
ported or endorsed by the organizations--often universities--that own
the computers on which the information is stored. Nor do the servers
provide any guarantees that a person's public key is valid, still
active, or uncompromised.

Think of them as bulletin boards in a public hallway. You can post--
and retrieve--messages there, but you must use your own judgment and
your own resources to assess the validity of what you discover.

Because the PGP keyservers regularly transmit information to each
other to keep the entire system updated and synchronized, you don't
have to bother contacting more than one server. Each one can give you
the exact same information that all the others can provide.

These PGP keyservers are set up to handle requests for information
that come in by e-mail. There's no provision for other forms of
access, like FTP, Gopher, WWW, or anything else. This means you put
your requests or commands to one of the PGP keyservers in the SUBJECT
line of an e-mail message. Generally, the keyservers ignore the body
of your e-mail messages, unless they command you send requires them to
pay attention to certain highly specific information contained there.

For example, your first message might look like this:

To: pgp-public-keys@pgp.mit.edu
From: yourname@your.net.site
Subject: help

You can leave this message blank, because the PGP keyserver will
ignore whatever it contains, anyway. Here are three fundamental steps
you'll want to take with PGP keyservers:

To add your public key to the database: Create an email message in the
form:

To: pgp-public-keys@pgp.mit.edu
From: yourname@your.net.site
Subject: add

In the body of this message, include a copy of your public key, en-
coded with the "-a" switch to make it suitable for transmission over
Internet e-mail.

To revoke your public key: Use the PGP command "-kd" to create a Key
Revocation Certificate for your existing public key. Now use the same
"add" procedure from above, but this time include your revoked public
key in the body of the message you send to the PGP keyservers. The PGP
keyservers will recognize that your key is now revoked, and update
their files to reflect the change. Anyone who now asks for your public
key will discover it is no longer valid.

To obtain the public key of a person with whom you want to communi-
cate - Create an email message in the form:

To: pgp-public-keys@pgp.mit.edu
From: yourname@your.net.site
Subject: get "othername"

Naturally, you'll replace "othername" with the actual name of the
person whose public key you want. The PGP keyservers will send back an
email with the key you're looking for.

Be Sure To Sign Your PGP Public Key

You don't have to sign your public key before you make it available
over the PGP keyservers, or directly to a friend or coworkers. But if
you don't, you're leaving open a potential crack in your privacy.
Here's why: Without any signatures on it, it's possible for someone to
edit your public key message. Of course, they can't modify the key
itself, but they can change--for example--your listed email address.
If they replace that email address with another valid address, perhaps
their own, then people who rely on your signature block to find your
email address will actually be sending encoded (and perhaps unencoded)
messages to the hacker instead of to you. Of course, the hacker won't
be able to decode your protected messages. But you won't, either,
since you won't receive them. At worst, this unwanted interference can
disrupt important communications long enough for you to miss a crucial
deadline for action. But even if the interference only results in a
short delay--depending on how long it takes your correspondents to
contact you some other way to find out why you're not replying to your
email--it's still an annoyance. And you can't be sure it will result
only in short delays and compromises of unimportant messages.

Sign Early. The best time to sign your own PGP public key is immedi-
ately after you create it. The proper PGP command is:

pgp -ks

If you create public keys with more than one user name, be sure to
sign each one separately.

Keep Checking Your Own Public Key. One of the problems with trying to
maintain your privacy is that those who want to breach it can make
progress if you are not vigilant. That's why it's important you keep
checking your own public key to make sure it hasn't been tampered
with. For example, our mysterious attacker can modify your public key
in at least two different ways to compromise your privacy. If you
don't monitor for interference, the compromises can remain in place
indefinitely:

Compromise 1: Suppose you place your public key on the PGP keyservers,
then ignore it for a long time. An attacker can download your public
key, create a new public key with the same user name, and replace your
key with his key. Now messages that people think they are encoding to
you will arrive totally indecipherable.

Compromise 2: The wily attacker may not only replace your public key
with his own, but will modify the email address it contains to match
his own, too. Now unsuspecting people who think they are encoding
messages to you will actually be encoding them and sending them to the
unsuspected attacker. Everything intended to be seen by your eyes only
will be openly available to the person who has substituted his key for
yours.

The only defenses are:

1.  Keep monitoring your public keys for any changes. As soon as you
    see a change, revoke that key and issue a new one.

2.  Encourage those who communicate with you to examine your key-id
    and key-fingerprint. The key-id and fingerprint are two relatively
    simple numbers that a person can read to you from the copy of
    "your" public key he has just downloaded from a PGP keyserver. If
    the numbers don't match the key-id and fingerprint in the public
    key you originally sent to the PGP keyservers, it has been tam-
    pered with.

3.  Sign your own public key, and encourage those who use it to de-
    crypt the signature before try sending you a message with it. If
    it decrypts properly, the key is valid. If not, they should not
    rely on it at all.

4.  In extreme situations, you can insist that people not send you a
    coded message unless they receive your public key with 100% cer-
    tainty that it came directly from you.

A list of recently active PGP Keyservers includes the following:

                    pgp-public-keys@pgp.mit.edu

                    pgp-public-keys@demon.co.uk

                    pgp-public-keys@pgp.ox.ac.uk

                  pgp-public-keys@ext221.sra.co.jp

                       pgp-public-keys@kub.nl

                  pgp-public-keys@pgp.iastate.edu

                    pgp-public-keys@dsi.unimi.it

                    pgp-public-keys@pgp.dhp.com

Know Who's Asking For Your Password. Stories are circulating about
hackers who have managed to compromise some networks and put their
own messages on the screens of individual users. In one form or
another, the messages claim that the system needs verification of the
user's password, and ask them to re-enter it.

Later, these users often discover that someone--using their correct
password--has compromised their files or trashed their good name by
sending vulgar or obscene information into the network.

You probably know not to give your credit card numbers to people who
call you and ask for them. In just the same way, never give your
password to a computer that asks for it in any unusual way. If you're
in the middle of a session and you're asked for your password, it's
safer to log off and log back on than to give your correct password
when you have no idea who is asking for it.

The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse provides a toll-free hotline for
Californians who seek information about technology-related privacy
issues. The Clearinghouse, the first endeavor of its kind in the
nation, is administered by the University of San Diego's Center for
Public Interest Law. In operation since July 1992, it is funded by the
Telecommunications Education Trust, a program of the California Public
Utilities Commission. The purpose of the Clearinghouse is to raise
consumers' awareness of how technology affects personal privacy, to
help consumers take action to control their personal information by
means of practical tips on privacy protection, to respond to specific
privacy-related complaints from consumers, when appropriate to refer
people to the proper organizations for further assistance, and to
document Californians' concerns about privacy in regular reports made
available to policy makers, industry representatives and consumer
advocates.

Clearinghouse services include:

* The toll-free hotline for California consumers to report privacy
  abuses and request information on ways to protect their privacy.
  Assistance is available in English and Spanish. Since it was
  launched in October 1992, the hotline has received calls from
  17,000 consumers.

* 18 free fact sheets on privacy issues, available in English and
  Spanish.

* A computer bulletin board accessible via Internet and by direct
  modem connection. The BBS includes the texts of all fact sheets and
  provides updates on state and federal privacy legislation, as well
  as other information.

* Publication of an annual report that analyzes the data gathered by
  the project. The report is widely distributed to federal and state
  policy makers and consumer advocates.

For more information, contact:

Privacy Rights Clearinghouse
University of San Diego School of Law
Center for Public Interest Law
5998 Alcala Park
San Diego, CA 92110-2492
Telephone: 619-298-3396, Fax: 619-298-5681, Hotline: 800-773-7748
(California only), or 619-298-3396.
 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

This complimentary resource is (c) 1995 by Robert Moskowitz, who is
available for consulting, speaking and strategic planning on a wide
variety of white-collar productivity and technology issues. You can
reach him at (818) 224-4224, fax (818) 224-4343, email:
Robertam@ix.netcom.com or by mail to Box 6375, Woodland Hills, CA 91365.
Important: Individuals are licensed to store this file on their
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