BILL GATES VS. THE DRUG WAR

I. THE Drug Enforcement Administration's (DEA) Thomas A. Constantine,
a career cop, recently complained to Microsoft's Bill Gates, the
world's richest man, that encryption devices sold by his company and
used by international drug lords are so powerful that they cannot be
deciphered by law enforcement. "Well," replied Gates, "you've got to
get bigger computers."

That is reminiscent of Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake!" advice
for bread less French peasants. As Gates knows, no computer is big
enough to break Microsoft's new codes. But the Senate and House
Commerce committees last week (unreported in the major daily press)
approved bills to end export controls over encryption systems to which
law enforcement and national security officials have no access. That
would give the big drug cartels, now based in Mexico, worry free
communications with their U.S. operatives.

Constantine and FBI Director Louis J. Freeh are losing their battle to
be able to decipher criminal communications under court order. High
tech campaign money is winning out. The Republican Congress has
adopted Gates as its poster boy. Sen. John McCain, seeking the GOP
presidential nomination, changed sides three months ago and last week
guided anti control legislation out of the Commerce Committee, which
he heads. The normally loquacious President Clinton is silent, as Vice
President Al Gore courts Silicon Valley in quest of the presidency.

Freeh and Constantine are desperate. Wiretapping is law enforcement's
biggest weapon, authorized by court order 1,329 times nationwide in
1998 72 percent in drug cases. No longer able to infiltrate the
narcotics apparatus, the DEA depends on eavesdropping.

But intercepted conversations now are interrupted by a steady buzz,
signifying that intelligible conversation is encrypted. What experts
call "level one encryption" could be decoded, but the drug lords have
turned to "level two."

"And we can't break it," Constantine told me.

"There's no big computer in Livermore [Calif.] or in New York City
that you can take your staff to and say, 'Take the buzz, and make it
into words'; it's just that encryption is ahead of the power of the
decrypt." The agents need the key supplied by the manufacturers.

This was described to me by Freeh: "The equivalent would be if a criminal
had a safe where he kept evidence of his crime and we
convinced a judge that there was probable cause to believe the evidence,
and we'd get the order to open the safe. But we can't open it. We don't
have by brute force or any other technique the ability to get inside that
safe." There is no use getting a court ordered wiretap if drug lords can
cloak their conversations.

Why would Congress cripple law enforcement? The pressure is coming not
from present users of encryption devices but from the high tech
manufacturers. Picture the contrast between 60 year old Tom
Constantine, who began his 39 years in police work as a deputy sheriff
in Buffalo, and 44 year old Bill Gates, whose latest net worth is
calculated at $90 billion.

Constantine sees Gates and his Microsoft colleagues this way: "Their
No. 1 concern is to make money. They don't live in a neighborhood
where their mother is shot and killed by dope peddlers in a gang war,
They live on an island in Seattle with guards, and they don't grasp
that there are real people out there who get hurt by this stuff."

Constantine next week begins retirement in Schenectady, leaving behind
a world where court ordered wiretaps will be "a nullity because we
can't serve them" on drug lords. "Nobody's told us what the
alternatives are," he said. "They've told there are a lot of reasons
for technique to go unchecked, but nobody has told us what the
alternatives are. We don't know what we're supposed to do in the
absence of these tools."

Law enforcers have a handful of allies on Capitol Hill, led by House
Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss. Goss (R-Fla.) is trying to
slow legislation rushing through Congress. It it passes, the FBI and
the DEA will recommend a presidential veto, with no certainty of
success. Unless the tide turns, the U.S. government is about to hand
the drug cartels an incomparable advantage as they spread their poison
through the cities and towns of America.

ROBERT D. NOVAK