The Washington Post, June 10, 1996, p. A18. Global Village Cops? What will be the long-term effect of Internet technologies on global law enforcement? The amazing story of Bill and Anna Young, a k a Leslie Rogge and Judy Kay Wilson, offers one possible scenario. The pseudonymous Youngs, residents of Guatemala who the FBI says have been on a decade-long run from U.S. justice since Mr. Rogge was convicted of a string of bank robberies and other offenses, turned themselves in to authorities after a neighbor recognized Mr. Rogge's face on the FBI home page's Most Wanted list. According to a story first told in the Guatemala Weekly, the person who recognized him was a newly Internet-wired 14-year-old. The vision of the future evoked by this story, of a world in which the familiar "global village" becomes a place not just of instant communication but of neighborly nosiness and where no one can just melt into the crowd, is reassuring and unnerving in about equal proportions. (What if it were a network of hit men or an authoritarian government seeking a dissident, rather than the FBI, making use of this powerful technology?) But it's also worth keeping in mind that, other than the romance of the technology, it doesn't represent that great an advance on current global media that have made celebrities or fugitives' faces familiar to a vast public -- just ask Salman Rushdie. The Rogge nabbing is the first that the FBI credits to its home page specifically, but TV's "America's Most Wanted" has scored similar coups. The impossibility of predicting the exact shape of these extensions of policing is relevant as well to a report that the National Research Council recently issued on another computer technology issue -- the vexed matter of whether to ease export controls on encryption software, which encodes information sent electronically so that only a user with a key can decipher it. The government until now has resisted lifting controls on "uncrackable" encryption software -- that is, codes that are too complex to be broken by brute force -- unless the industry agrees to deposit keys in an escrow arrangement with a third party so the government can seek and obtain a warrant to read encoded communications if necessary. Software makers, meanwhile, are pushing hard to have these restrictions eased. The research council, an arm of the generally neutral National Academy of Sciences, sought to bridge the gap between industry interests and such government agencies as the FBI and national security agencies, whose case, they say, is based largely on classified matter that can't be publicly discussed. Part of the report's conclusion, which favors the easing though not the abolition of current restrictions, is that wider use of encryption technology will actually *help* national security and law enforcement because more data, economic and otherwise, will be secure to begin with. But if the news of the changing terrain tells anything, it is that it is far too soon to base arguments on such a premise. Our own sense on encryption is that the national security and law enforcement questions remain too important to be sacrificed lightly, despite the considerable economic interests of the parties on the other side. But the world of Internet law enforcement is still taking shape. Whatever the public conclusion on encryption, the debate should not rest on any assumptions about what that shape will be. --