The Administration
      The cacophony of administration voices was enough to cause many to lament the old days of the ambivalently-regarded Ira Magaziner, when at least one knew where the Clinton White House stood on questions of privacy, encryption, and government databases.
      Last week, people at the conference heard from officials ranging from Scott Charney, head of computer crime for the Justice Department, to Becky Burr, acting associate administrator of the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration, to Peter Swire, the administration's new privacy czar at the Office of Management of Budget.
      But while the increasing number of suits and button-down attire suggested an increasingly proliferation of lawyers cutting away at the conference's casual tradition, the conference is still full of netizens such as Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) author Phil Zimmerman, who said that he comes to the conferences not for what anyone says, but to catch up with his colleagues and friends.
      Moreover, the repeated barrage of questions asked during their remarks and heated hallway conversations suggest that the anti-government tradition of CFP, whose greatest article of faith seems to be "privacy is good, law enforcement is bad," isn't going to fade lightly away.
      Spurring the sharpest reactions were Charney and Stephen Kroll, counsel to the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), an agency established only in 1996 and which figured prominently in the recent debate about proposed Know Your Customer regulations mandating bank profiles of customers.

Controversy And Challenges
      Questioners riddled Charney, who spoke on a panel about "The Creation of a Global Surveillance Network," with remarks such as: "Law enforcement doesn't give a damn about us," "Most of the times we are approached by law enforcement, they lie to us about the meaning and breadth of the warrants they have," and, "How can you argue that all you want is a level playing field" with technological capabilities of previous decades when the 1990s have brought widespread access to video surveillance and credit card transaction information?
      One of the most pointed and personal reactions came from Patrick Ball of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, who said that in recent days he had received e-mails from human rights activists whose lives have been saved by using the PGP's strong encryption.
      "I don't think we can separate encryption from surveillance," Ball told Charney in the question and answer session. "Since the beginning of ethnic cleansing, many in Kosovo and Albania have been trying to get and send information. Their ability to protect content is fundamentally limited by 40-bit [encryption], but it appears that to U.S. government, a few dead human rights activists is an acceptable price to pay for control of cryptography."
      Charney countered with an example designed to curry favor with the civil libertarian mood of the conference: should the exclusionary rule be dropped just because it might result in the murderer going free, and then going on to murder others?
      "The problem is that life isn't that simple," said Charney. "You have to balance a lot of competing equities." Now is the time, he said, to begin to establish the practices and rules for the surveillance technologies that government needs to use to carry out its law enforcement functions.
      Kroll seemed to relish his role as the lightning rod on his panel, "Privacy and Profiling," and declared it an honor to appear at the conference. He agreed that the prevalence of publicly accessible records — such as the bankruptcy and land records that and increasing number of courts are posting online — means "people are being watched too closely."
      But he refused to bite when one questioner asked whether anti-fraud technologies, including many supported by FinCEN, would be necessary if strong encryption more widely utilized. "The question is not what is right and wrong, but balancing the right variable," he said.
      Cornered in the hallway afterwards by reporters, technology companies and Rotenberg, Kroll argued that many of the techno-elite were trying to use the Internet both as a tool for publishing to the world and super-secret communication.
      "You can't have it both ways," he declared. "It's either private or open to the public."
      The questions didn't stop there. Commerce Department officials Burr and Paula Bruening, along with White House officials Swire and Tom Kalil, all fielded repeated questions about whether the Administration's policy of self-regulation of business privacy policies would prove adequate.
      And Hong Kong privacy commissioner Stephen Lau pointedly questioned Clinton-appointed Federal Trade Commissioner Mozelle Thompson on the subject of individuals' ability to obtain personal information about themselves.
      "To me, access on something that belongs to them, or at a minimum relates to them, is a fundamental right," Lau said. "I am not certain as to why this debate is going on."
      But future discussions of administration policy are more likely to resemble the heated give-and-take of many in the technology community and many in the administration on a wide range of issues.
      Reacting to praise from a sympathetic conference attendee who marveled at Charney's grace under pressure, the Justice Department computer cop replied, citing Friedrich Nietzsche: "Whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger."
—by Drew Clark