Liberal party: definitely no crypto ban in Germany

[3umoelle@informatik.uni-hamburg.de (Ulf M�ller)]

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."