By John Markoff in {The New York Times}, February 6, 1992 at D1 Advocates of privacy rights are challenging the nation's most clandestine intelligence-gathering agency over how much confidentiality people will have when communicating via the next generation of cellular telephones and wireless computers. The issue has emerged at meetings this week of an obscure committee of telecommunications experts that is to decide what kinds of protections against eavesdropping should be designed into new models of cellular phones. People concerned with privacy are eager to incorporate more potent scrambling and descrambling codes in equipment to prevent the eavesdropping that is so easy and so common in the current generation of cellular phones. But privacy advocates contend that the industry committee has already decided not to adopt the maximum level of protection because of pressure from the National Security Agency, whose intelligence gathering includes listening in on phone conversations in foreign countries and intercepting data sent by computers. The privacy-rights faction contends that the security agency opposes codes that are hard to crack because the equipment might be used overseas. "The NSA is trying to weaken privacy technology," said Marc Rotenberg, Washington director of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, a public advocacy group organized by computer scientists and engineers. "At stake is nothing less than the future of our privacy in the communications world." The standards setting group is made up of cellular telephone equipment manufacturers and service providers. The National Security Agency is the Defense Department Agency in charge of electronic intelligence gathering around the world for use by many other branches of the government. Officials of the agency, who have been participating in the meetings as observers, said their only interest in the matter was insuring that the government's own secure telephones were compatible with the new cellular phones. They said that agency officials have specifically been told not to participate in the standards-setting effort, and indeed some engineers attending the meetings said they have felt no outside pressure. But other engineers involved in the standards process said the agency's presence had loomed large in earlier technical meetings during the past two years. "I would talk to people and they would say, 'The NSA wouldn't like this, or wouldn't like that,'" said one committee member, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified. The Agency's Long Reach The debate is important, the privacy advocates say, not just for cellular phones but for many other emerging technologies that communicate using radio signals, which are easier to intercept than information sent over conventional telephone lines. These include wireless "personal communicators" that transmit and receive data, and portable "notebook" computers. But the dispute also illustrates that even as the cold war ebbs, the National Security Agency is still wielding influence over many United States high-technology industries. Indeed, executives from a number of high-technology companies say the agency is hampering their efforts to compete for business overseas by forcing them to make products for foreign markets that are different from products sold domestically. The agency exercises this power in evaluating some of the applications by companies to export high-technology products. In that role, critics say, the agency has opposed exports of equipment fitted with advanced encryption systems that are increasingly vital to modern business. Buyers Can Shop Elsewhere The agency's critics say it is almost impossible to contain the proliferation of encryption technologies and that customers who are deterred from buying it in the United States will simply shop abroad or steal the technology. "The notion that you can control this technology is comical," said William H. Neukom, vice president for law and corporate affairs at Microsoft Corporation, the big software publisher. Critics also say that it is ludicrous that encryption systems used in popular software programs receive the type of Government scrutiny that might be expected for weapons. "The notion that our our products should be classified as munitions, and treated that way just doesn't make sense at all," Mr. Neukom said. Privacy advocates have also challenged the committee's intention not to publish the algorithm on which the encryption technology is based. Traditionally, cryptographers have said that the best way to ensure that encryption techniques work is to publish the formulas so they can be publicly tested. The committee has said that it will not disclose the formula because it does not want to criminals an opportunity to crack the code. But publishing the formula is only a danger only if the formula is weak, said John Gilmore, a Silicon Valley software designer, and privacy advocate. If the formula is strong, disclosing it publicly and letting anyone try to crack it would simply prove it works. The code, however, is simple to break, say a number of engineers who have examined it. Several committee members said they realized that the security agency would never permit the adoption of an unbreakable privacy scheme. "The cynics in the bar would say that you're never going to get anything by the NSA that they can't crack trivially anyway," said Peter Nurse, chairman of the authentication and privacy subcommittee of the standards committee and an engineer at Hughes Network Systems. NSA Role Denied But a number of engineers who worked on the technical standard insist that the agency has had no overt role in setting it. "The standard was based on the technical deliberations of some of the best experts in North America," said John Marinho, chairman of the standards committee and an executive at AT&T. He said the committee relied on the NSA only for guidance on complying with United States regulations. He also said that the new standard would offer far more privacy protection than is available under the present cellular telephone system. Today, although it is against the law to eavesdrop on a cellular telephone conversation, many individuals modify commercial radio scanners so they can receive the frequencies on which cellular calls are transmitted.