Thought y'all might find this interesting: Editorial in The Sacramento Bee, June 3, 1996 --------------------------------------------- THE VALUE OF ENCRYPTION In a report commissioned by Congress, the National Research Council has injected some perspective into the noisy and often uncivil debate over encryption of electronic communications. Although the Clinton administration shows no signs of heeding the NRC's advice, Congress will find the NRC recommendations an excellent guide to national encryption policy. For years, the extremes in the debate over the administration's efforts to restrict the use of encryption have focused on rival bogeys. Intelligence and law enforcement have warned of the specter of terrorist or criminal groups able to use encryption to prevent detection by wiretapping. In reply, civil libertarians opposed to Clinton administration efforts to promote an encryption standard that would leave government agencies with the key to open up all communications to scrutiny have held up the specter of "Big Brother." By contrast, the NRC panel -- which was chaired by Kenneth Dam, a deputy secretary of state in the Reagan administration, and included a distinguished group of former top law enforcement and Pentagon officials -- took a more nuanced approach. The spread of encryption, the panel agreed, will make it harder for spies and cops to listen in on enemies and signals. But the greater terrorist and criminal threat, it concluded, arises from electronic networks vulnerable to tampering. The law enforcement benefit from the wider use of encryption to keep a terrorist hacker from shutting down the air traffic control system or an electronic criminal from looting bank transactions will outweigh the diminished utility of wiretapping. Thus, the panel recommends that national policy promote the use of encryption to protect vital communications systems, such as voice and cellular telephone systems, from intrusion by criminals. To give businesses and individuals confidence in encryption, standards and technology should be driven by the market and by users, not by the government. And because current restrictions on the export of encryption software leave U.S. firms abroad vulnerable and inhibit the use of the best encryption in U.S. products, it also recommends relaxation of those controls. The burgeoning Internet and expanding wireless communications will be essential to the economy's growth over the next generation. But those technologies can never achieve their full potential if commercial transactions and personal communications are vulnerable to interception. The NRC report makes plain that encryption is less of a problem than a solution. Its recommendations provide Congress with a guide to policy at a time that the Clinton administration is paralyzed, its finger in the dike, protecting against a technological flood that it cannot hope to control. Copyright, 1996, The Sacramento Bee -------------------------------- Glenn C. Jones "If you're walkin' on thin ice, you might as well dance." --------------------------------