by: F.R. Duplantier

"As strong cryptography became easily accessible in the late 1980s and early 1990s, two government agencies grew concerned about its widespread deployment," recalls Ronald Rivest, co-inventor of the most widely used public-key cryptosystem. "The National Security Agency, which monitors electronic communications around the globe, worried that it would be unable to decipher the encrypted messages of potential spies and terrorists. Similarly, the Federal Bureau of Investigation feared that criminals in the U.S. would use the encryption software to thwart surveillance of their voice or data communications."

Writing in a recent issue of the Scientific American, Rivest concedes that criminal and terrorist elements will exploit cryptographic technology, making law enforcement more difficult. He focuses, however, on "cryptography's benefits to society as a whole. Most people use cryptography to prevent crime rather than to hide it," Rivest observes. "By ensuring the confidentiality and authenticity of electronic banking and Internet commerce, cryptography prevents theft and credit-card fraud. The vigorous application of cryptography," he continues, "may also improve national security: the encryption of communications, for example, protects U.S. businesses from industrial espionage."

Rivest rejects the government's Big Brother approach: "key-escrow proposals that would require users to register their software encryption keys with law-enforcement agencies, and key-recovery proposals that would give government agencies backdoor access to the keys." He cautions that such systems are "very easy to circumvent: spies and criminals could modify the encryption software to disable the key-recovery features, or they could simply download alternative software from the Internet. Key recovery would be very expensive, too," Rivest adds. "Someone would have to pay for creating, staffing, and maintaining the key-recovery centers."

The threat created may be worse than the threat averted. "Key-recovery systems would also create substantial security risks," Rivest predicts. "The system's most serious flaw," he explains, "is that the same back doors used by the FBI to decipher encrypted messages would become targets for criminals, hackers, spies, and even disgruntled employees of the FBI itself. If criminals or hackers managed to penetrate a key-recovery center and steal a master backdoor encryption key," Rivest warns, "they would be able to decrypt Internet communications at will. Millions of corporate, personal, and government secrets would suddenly become vulnerable to theft and tampering."

Perhaps that's the idea: to give our rivals and our enemies access to the proprietary information from which America's wealth derives. Perhaps that's the idea behind proposed changes in our patent laws, as well. Why would anyone want to give away the store? Money, of course. Imagine the commission that foreign agents would pay to any man who could provide access to America's intellectual property. Surely some of our more calculating public servants find such an enormous sum tempting. If the policies of Bill Clinton in particular, of the Democratic Party as a whole, and of certain Republicans seem not to serve the interests of this nation, perhaps it's because they don't. Perhaps they serve the interests of some other nation, with commissions accumulating in offshore accounts.