Germany's liberal party FDP, which forms the government together with the larger Christian Democrats (CDU), has announced that they will not accept any restrictions to the use of cryptography. Yesterday the German Bundestag began to debate the draft Information and Communication Services Law (see http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/ckuner/homepage.htm for information about that draft). Both Minister of Justice Schmidt-Jortzig and FDP research politics speaker Laermann said that cryptography must not be banned. Laermann said the FDP will definitely not accept any crypto law that restricts or bans using cryptography. "I say this in the knowledge that what is desired herewith firstly is technically impossible, and secondly it cannot be allowed to give up protection of private, economic and - I say this from personal first hand, I may say bitter experience - scientific data from unauthorized, unfair and even criminal doings. The FDP will not allow that." The FDP supports the draft Digital Signature Law, but will resist any attempts to abuse the security infrascture as an entry into crypto regulation. Until recently, the FDP position on cryptography has been indifferent. Early this year FDP politicians have begun to verbosely contradict those in the CDU that want to restrict cryptography. In March, Minister of Justice Schmidt-Jortzig said at a North German FDP convention: "Currently there exist demands to ban cryptography or to deposit all keys with a central authority that can then arbitrarily decrypt messages. Those demands are deeply illiberal." The convention passed a resolution saying that "Nobody may restrict the citicens' right to use encryption to protect their data from unauthorized access by third parties." The Bundestag vice president Burkhard Hirsch published a statement on the FDP web server, saying that banning cryptography clearly is pointless, and precisely for that reason not even the Third Reich or East Germany had tried to do so. In a letter to the newsmagazine Spiegel, he wrote: "You could laugh your head off, if you didn't know that they really mean it."