Janet Reno Wants to Read Your E-Mail

by Andrew Grossman

There's a growing rift in our culture, a division beyond the haves and the have-nots. We've reached a point in the Information Explosion when Americans can be thought of as either getting it or not. The East and West Coasts get it; the South and Midwest don't. The young get it; the old don't. It's nothing so simple as AOL access or an E-mail account. It is the understanding of the fundamental social change that has occurred over the past five years, a paradigm shift in the way that we work and communicate.

Some people have made the Internet a part of their lives. Others strike out against it with a neo-Luddite, reactionary ideology. Unfortunately, while both groups are well-represented among our elected representatives, neither is working, it seems, in the best interest of Americans, or even necessarily in good faith.

Last week, Senators Diane Feinstein and Orrin Hatch—strange bedfellows, to be sure—introduced the benignly-titled Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act, the latest salvo in the War on Drugs. The Act goes beyond ending the distribution of speed, which has been illegal for some time. It is instead an assault on the right that, post-Columbine, has borne the brunt of populist aggression: free speech.

Feinstein, notorious California liberal, and Hatch, conservative presidential contender from Utah, propose that the proprietors of World Wide Web sites be subject to arrest and prosecution if their sites link to drug-related content. Linking to sites that aid in the acquisition of “drug paraphernalia” or that contain information about the “manufacture or use of a controlled substance” could land you in prison for three or ten years, respectively.

By reporting that heroin and crack are available in East Harlem, The New York Times could face criminal charges. By publishing the chemical composition of LSD, the Merck Pharmaceuticals Index might also find itself in court. Federal agents would surely shut down the Better Homes and Gardens website—because of the resources that it provides to marijuana cultivators.

“Maybe nobody has told Dianne Feinstein that it's not very hard to grow marijuana,” suggested David Boaz, Vice-President of the Cato Institute. With the Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act, the War on Drugs would move from banning substances to censoring even discussion of them. And the Internet may not enjoy the same First Amendment protections as the print media.

Still, such a law would be virtually unenforceable: digital bits can be effortlessly moved beyond the country's borders. The sheer number of websites precludes the effective enforcement of any regulations defining appropriate content.

The Clinton administration is tackling a similar problem in an even more insidious way. The President and friends are all familiar with the Internet and the Information Age, and harbor a penchant for intrusive federal oversight. Enter FIDNet, perhaps the most citizen-hostile move by the executive branch since investigations of anti-American activities in the Fifties.

For the uninitiated, FIDNet, the Federal Intrusion Detection Network, is intended to “protect our national information infrastructure” by monitoring non-governmental computer networks. It already sounds suspicious.

Private industry is pretty skilled at monitoring its own networks, and the need for government intervention is, well, nonexistent. FIDNet would monitor Internet traffic for signs of illegal activity. The E-mail you read, the webpages you view, and the transactions you make over the Internet would be available to federal agents. It's as if the government required us to write with special pencils that transmitted every loop and dot to Washington.

There's no reason for the government to provide this service to private industry. The fear that a hostile foreign power could cripple our nation's information and commercial infrastructure, as any first-year computer science major could tell you, is irrational. To begin with, ARPAnet, the military predecessor to today's Internet, was designed as a distributed network with multiple paths of redundancy. Simply put, if a wire, or many wires, are damaged, the network still works. The idea that a hostile power could bring down the Internet makes as much sense as saying one could bring down the Postal Service: it's possible but extremely unlikely. Maybe we should monitor people's mail—just to be safe.

The idea of “cyber-terrorism” is an invention of federal agencies with falling budgets and bureaucrats looking for something new to bureaucratize. Bombs do not explode online. No one has been shot online.

Perhaps the only deaths directly attributable to the Internet involve old, infirm men and explicit pornography, which, although tragic, hardly represent a threat to national security.

At worst, a hostile party could shut down a site or two, perhaps Amazon and Yahoo!, for a short period of time. It would inconvenience thousands, but hardly seems comparable to traditional violence-based terrorism.

Few sites can't adequately deal with such an “attack,” and those sites are either administrated poorly or don't have a reasonable backup system. Like the Internet itself, large Internet sites employ redundancy to protect themselves from hardware, software, and other failures. Even if a central computer goes down, for whatever reason, Amazon could have its site operational again in minutes, if it goes offline at all. And that would also be the case if their main Internet connection was severed. Companies should invest in this sort of insurance; it's not the place of the federal government.

Serious cyber-criminals, FIDNet's ostensible targets, often use heavy encryption, anyway, rendering their communications unreadable by law enforcement agencies. People involved in sensitive electronic transactions—whether crime, E-commerce, or personal E-mail, routinely use encryption; any electronic criminal who fails to encode his communications is surely an amateur and beneath the radar of FIDNet. The only targets of the plan, then, are casual computer users, the American public.

We don't expect the government to be listening to every phone call. We shouldn't expect them to be reading every E-mail or taking notes everytime one accesses a particular website.

The Internet is the first technology to allow true freedom of broadcasting, in which nearly any user can broadcast easily to any other group of users. College students launch sites that serve millions of hits per day, on par with—or surpassing—the sites of established commercial entities. But this also makes the Internet a regulatory nightmare for those who feel the need to work in our “best interests.”.

With television and radio, regulatory agencies can oversee and control a handful of providers. The government is finding itself increasingly incapable of doing anything with the Internet through traditional communications regulation. It seems that even those who understand the Information Age don't really “get it” when it comes to the benefits of uncontrollable expression.