Little Pitchers

Children hear and understand more than you think they do. I know that from hard experience as a parent, and they often reach conclusions that may be accurate though inconvenient. That is true with a friend of mine, and it has been true for a long time.

“Little pitchers have big ears,” goes the quote, which appears to have been written down by John Heywood in 1546 this way: ‘Avoyd your children, smal pitchers have wide eares,'” apparently referring to the outsized handles on serving ewers. I think it is good counsel, and even more so today.

A team of three Chinese women has apparently cracked the code that makes many internet transactions “secure.” The algorithm is called SHA-1, and is more popularly known as a “hash.” It is used to scramble computer code in a manner that is unique to an individual transaction. It creates a digital signature, and is used to authenticate many internet transactions, like the ones I was making last night in a frantic effort to finish my shopping.

The National Security Agency came up with the encryption technique as part of its dual mission to protect American communications and penetrate other Peoples. It was quickly adopted as the standard for the government, and thus is now in the purview of the National Institute for Standards and Technology. The NIST issued a press release pooh-poohing the accomplishment. I suppose they would have to, since a panic by consumers right before the Holidays would be a bad thing.

They said the methodology the women came up with is more theoretical than practical, and would take far too much computing power to employ in an operational sense. Besides, said the spokesman, they now recommend a stronger algorithm, known as SHA-256, and did so a full week before the Chinese announcement. Everything is just fine.

I was relieved to hear that. The only place that enough computer power resides to do something about that is in the basement of some buildings at Fort Meade .

But it was funny to look through the articles in the Times this morning. The General might be in hot water this morning, according to the second lead item. I have met him on three continents, though he might not remember me. I was one of the little pitchers in the room, hanging on every word.

He used to run NSA, which is located up the road, almost to Baltimore . I have often thought that was one of the great problems in the U.S. Intelligence Community, the thirty miles of I-95 that separates Washington from Fort Meade . It is just far enough away that going to a meeting turns into an all-day affair. Spooks from the Agencies in Washington proper hate to get rotational assignments there, since it means adding hours to the daily commute.

When it is icy or snowing, as it has been lately, Fort Meade might as well be on another planet. When you combine the location with the sensitive mission, it is no wonder that NSA is such an insular place.

The New York Times was not commenting on the hardship of the employee commute. They were intent on blowing the lid off a special operation that the General authorized to collect information which could have involved U.S. Citizens, in direct response to a Presidential Finding.

The President has the authority to do that, so I was curious to see what the Times was so agitated about. The nuance appears to be that the intercepts were made without court order, which is granted by a special panel established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. As I recall, after 9/11, there seemed to be some urgency about the matter at the time, since bad men had recently slaughtered a few thousand of my countrymen.

But the urgency has ebbed. Elections seem to be successful in Iraq , and I get the oddest feeling that we are about to declare victory in the War on Terror, when we might- just might- have turned the corner on a conflict that has only a tangential relationship to it.

I was briefly puzzled by the timing of the revelations, until I realized that the bill to authorize continuation of the USA Patriot Act has passed in the House and is going to the Senate, where there is fierce resistance. The Act contains some provisions to relax some of the restrictions on the intelligence community and law enforcement, which I generally support.

I hate myself when I get sucked into the buzz. There is news, which is like a car wreck or a truck bomb, and then there is information calculated to advance some policy position or another that is dressed up to look like news.

As best I could tell from the article, the worst thing that happened was that some idiot from Ohio was prevented from trying to chop down the Brooklyn Bridge with an acetylene torch. I’m not sure what I was supposed to take away from the article. Should we have more bridge attacks, or fewer?

The General is a pretty good guy, as things go in the business, and I think the Patriot Act ought to be debated on the merits. I think we all ought to realize that little pitchers have big ears. If it is not Fort Meade that is listening, it will be the Chinese, or hackers from East Europe . Times have changed, and the quaint notion of privacy that I hold so dear appears to be increasingly tenuous in the digital age.

So let’s take the old admonition to heart and get on with things. People keep telling me we are at war, but there seems to be no consensus on that. I guess we aren’t, or maybe with the Holidays bearing down on us, we just don’t have time for it.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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