Interesting People mailing list archives
IP: EMERGING JAPANESE ENCRYPTION POLICY
From: Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>
Date: Mon, 05 Feb 1996 11:23:55 -0500
A longer version of both pieces can be found at "http://www.us.net/~steptoe/welcome.htm" EMERGING JAPANESE ENCRYPTION POLICY by Stewart A. Baker Steptoe & Johnson sbaker () steptoe com http://www.us.net/~steptoe/welcome.htm Japan's encryption policymaking is in its early stages, but there are strong signs that encryption is increasingly seen as a key technology for improving Japan's penetration of the Global Information Infrastructure. A highly selective (and possibly biased) sampling of informed Japanese opinion on cryptography suggests a growing determination to treat cryptography as a national Japanese economic priority. In the United States and Europe, encryption policy is formed by a mix of interests. Advocates of business, national security agencies, and more recently the police -- all play a large role in the policy debate. This policy triumvirate is difficult to see in Japan. For a variety of reasons, commercial interests are predominant in Japanese government thinking about encryption. Time after time during my interviews, I was reminded that Japan was an island nation that has not had to defend itself for fifty years and so has not had to confront the national security concerns associated with encryption. And Japanese police face severe political and constitutional constraints on wiretapping, so the prospect of losing this criminal investigative tool seems not to be as troubling to the Japanese government as to the United States and many European nations. That leaves business interests in command of encryption policy inside Japan. And business interests increasingly see encryption as an enabling technology that is critical for Japanese success in a world suffused with information networks. Cryptography is seen as a key technology for a variety of network payment problems, from ensuring the identity of each party to the transaction to providing an electronic receipt without creating a risk to the privacy of electronic transactions. Just below the surface of Japanese government comments on encryption policy there seems to lie a suspicion that U.S. government concerns about national security and law enforcement are an excuse to perpetuate what is increasingly seen as U.S. domination of a strategic industrial technology. Some officials insisted that all encryptionsystems can be broken, suggesting that the solution was to fund better police decryption technology. Others suggested that the solution was to have two levels of encryption -- reserving the most powerful for government and national security while encouraging commercial encryption standards that are less strong. This approach, however, has proven to be a dead end in the United States, where any cryptographic strength deemed exportable has immediately been condemned as insufficient by business and cryptography experts. All in all, the emerging Japanese consensus on cryptography could pose a major challenge to U.S. (and perhaps European) government hopes of striking a compromise between commercial and governmental interests with respect to cryptographic policy. If Japan puts the weight of its government and industry behind strong, unescrowed encryption, competitive pressure will quickly doom any attempt to influence this technology through export controls and standard-making. Governments will be forced to choose between overt regulation in the Russian and French manner or laissez-faire policies of the sort that now prevail in the domestic markets of countries like the United States, Great Britain, and Germany. Whether Japanese policy will in fact coalesce around a purely commercial approach to cryptography remains to be seen. In response to the analysis above, one senior MPT official stated that the U.S. and European concerns had not been well understood in Japan until the OECD meeting and that the MPT's study group would be giving special importance to the issue in its review of electronic payment systems. Thus, it is apparently still possible that Japan will join with the U.S. and European governments in seeking to shape a more accessible encryption standard.
Current thread:
- IP: EMERGING JAPANESE ENCRYPTION POLICY Dave Farber (Feb 05)