---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 28 Jan 1998 13:46:48 -0800 (PST) From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> To: politech@vorlon.mit.edu Subject: FBI tells Congress encryption "is a critical problem" ******** The nation's top cops aren't happy about Americans using data-scrambling software to shield their correspondence from prying eyes. Today the deputy director of the FBI told the Senate Intelligence committee that encryption "is a critical problem" that Congress needs to solve -- presumably by banning email and other programs that his G-men can't crack. (http://cgi.pathfinder.com/netly/opinion/0,1042,1385,00.html). Bob Bryant warned the committee that "the widespread use of robust non-key recovery encryption will ultimately devastate our ability to fight crime and prevent terrorism." Which is precisely what Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb) claims he's concerned about. He said "if we want to make the American people continue to feel safe," the National Security Agency and the FBI "have to be able to somehow deal with not just the complexity of signals, but increasingly encrypted signals that are impossible for us to break." Not surprisingly, the question of why the FBI and NSA should have the ability to listen in on any conversation was left unasked. --By Declan McCullagh/Washington (declan@well.com)