TWP on Crypto Policy

[jya@pipeline.com (John Young)]

   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. 
 
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