FBI tells Congress encryption "is a critical problem"

[Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>]

---------- 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)