www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,46816,00.html
Muslims * Hide Out Under a 28 Security Blanket * Today's Top 5 Stories * 29 Playing With Sounds in Your Head * 30 Makeovers Dot-Com: Check It Out * 31 California Bans E-Vote Machines * 32 NZ Volcano Scarier Than Mt. Servicemen in Iraq * 36 Western Firm Pulls Staff from Yanbu; Cautions * 37 Gunmen Kill Settler, Four Daughters Amid Gaza Vote * 38 American Trucker Free After 3 Weeks as Iraq Hostage * 39 Son of Ex-Dictator Seen Winning Panama Election * 40 More Breaking News * 41 Wire Service Photo Gallery Tech Jobs Partner 42 Today's the Day. Tuesday's catastrophe, which shed more blood on American soil than any event since the Civil War, appears to have started that process. Judd Gregg (R-New Hampshire) called for a global prohibition on encryption products without backdoors for government surveillance. Gregg said encryption makers "have as much at risk as we have at risk as a nation, and they should understand that as a matter of citizenship, they have an obligation" to include decryption methods for government agents. Gregg's speech comes at a time when privacy and national security, long at odds, had reached an uneasy detente. In response to business pressure and the reality of encryption embedded into everything from Linux to new Internet protocols, the Clinton administration dramatically relaxed -- but did not remove -- regulations intended to limit its use and dissemination. Janet Reno, Clinton's attorney general, said in September 1999 that the new regulations struck a reasonable balance between privacy and security. The four hijacked airplanes and the disasters they created have abruptly returned the debate on Capitol Hill to where it was years ago, when FBI Director Louis Freeh spent much of his time telling anyone who would listen that terrorists were using encryption -- and Congress should approve restrictions on domestic use. Another Clinton administration initiative was the 50 Clipper Chip, a cryptographic device that included both a data-scrambling algorithm and a method for certain goverment officials to decode intercepted, Clipper-encoded communications. After a public outcry, the federal government eventually abandoned its plans to try to convince American businesses to build Clipper-enabled products. But some of encryption's brightest lights are already worrying about the effect of Draconian new laws and regulations. End of story Send e-mail icon Have a comment on this article? Your use of this website constitutes acceptance of the Lycos 78 Privacy Policy and 79 Terms & Conditions Note: You are reading this message either because you can not see our css files (served from Akamai for performance reasons), or because you do not have a standards-compliant browser.
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