Subterranean Clipper Chip Blues
Penn Jillette

"Phone's tapped anyway":
Jump on the Clipper-Chip-
Hate-Bandwagon. Do it for
Dylan. Do it for
Jefferson (Airplane,
Starship and Thomas).

I've never had a sip of alcohol, or any recreational drugs (not one puff to un-inhale), but, being 38 years old, I feel I was part of the hippy culture. I was young and rural but my formative years were spent listening to music created by people who chased the muse down many chemical alleys. Top 40 radio blared that the government wasn't to be trusted. Dylan sang "Phone's tapped anyway" and his inflection said that was a bad thing. But even as I was sucking up the culture, my skeptical side said that all the "Tin Soldiers and Nixon Coming" stuff might be a little over dramatic. Romanticizing living outside the law, coupled with the physiological effect of the drugs, might be making these artists a little paranoid, a little nutty. The joke was kinda on me - paranoid or not, John Lennon was on Nixon and F.B.I. hate lists, the Viet Nam war probably was a very bad idea and the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up really did happen. No government is to be trusted. I could have gotten a stronger lesson from the Founding Fathers but they didn't have any records out. "You say you want a revolution?" - "The government that governs least governs best." Clinton is younger than any Rolling Stone (unless they replace Bill Wyman with a new bass player from his ex-wife's generation). It would seem that Bill Jefferson Clinton would share the mistrust of Big Brother that we tapped our collective foot to. But, remember, he's not Bob Dylan and Neil Young - he's Kenny G and Fleetwood Mac. Watch him. Willy picked up Bush's evil encryption Clipper Chip fascist football and ran with it ("Meet the new boss - same as the old boss"). The Clipper Chip is supposed to give us more privacy which we need: An ex-friend of mine taped Madonna talking to her business manager on her cordless phone and some punk ("punk" in the prison sense) broke into my Internet account and read my mail. The Clipper Chip was designed by government engineers and would be used to scramble and decode information so only the addressee could read it. The government would sell this chip below market value (some people believe they'd be getting something for nothing - some people believe Elvis put syringes in Pepsi) and we'd all have cheap privacy. Oh, by the way, ("The large print giveth, the small print taketh away"), the government would keep all the keys so they could eavesdrop on might-be-bad-guys (with a subpoena, of course). WHAT?! (I never needed an interrobang before, but can I please have one now?!) The anti-Clipper Chip people sent me megs and megs of reasons why the Clipper Chip sucks (i.e., The information on how it works is kept secret so private scientists can't check for mistakes. How safe can the codes be kept? It makes trade with other countries difficult. Etc.). Big cheese computer people yapped against it and it got shot down this first time around on the legislation front. On the tech front, there is a great cypherpunk, ("punk" in the rock and roll sense) alternative called Pretty Good Privacy, that's non-government and free. One of my math-hip friends explained public key encryption to me and it's pretty thinking, I'll try to explain it in a future column. There was even talk of making private encryption illegal (evil, pure and simple). The more research I did, the simpler it got. You have unalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That's it. We have a right to communicate with anyone we chose without anyone listening in. The government works for us. Power to the people.