IP: Encryption piece in Cybertimes

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

Support for Encryption Is Less 
Than U.S. Claims, Study Says


By JERI CLAUSING 
</NYT_BYLINE


ASHINGTON -- The Clinton administration is losing its battle to increase
international controls over how reliably computer data can be scrambled to
insure privacy, according to a report scheduled to be released Monday by an
independent research group. 
The administration has been lobbying members of the European Union and other
industrialized nations to back its efforts to place controls on "strong
encryption," a technology for scrambling data so effectively that the code
cannot be broken and the content cannot be deciphered without a digital key. 




The Encryption Debate: 
Is It About Privacy or Security? 
Data encrypting is used increasingly to protect the privacy of financial
transactions, medical records and business communications. The administration
wants the ability to descramble all encrypted messages to keep tabs on
criminals. 


In a report scheduled to be released Monday, the Electronic Privacy
Information
Center, a Washington-based research group, says that its survey of 243
governments showed that the United States is virtually the only democratic,
industrialized nation seeking domestic regulation of strong encryption. 




<http://www.nytimes.com/>http://www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/020998en
cryption.html