Aust: Encryption crackdown gets thumbs down
Proposals by the US government for a global ban on sophisticated encryption tools, thought to
have been used in the recent terrorist raids on the States, have been met with concern in
Australia.
As reported by ZDNet,
US Senator Judd Gregg
has proposed tighter
restrictions on the
use of encryption
software, which
scrambles electronic
data and hinders its
detection, and has
called for
international
support. Reports
since the Septermber
11 terrorist attacks
say that the FBI
believe such tools
were used to
orchestrate the
event.
Civil liberties group, Electronic Frontiers Australia said it would be opposed to any move by the Australian Federal Government to follow suit.
?That kind of proposal raises all kinds of questions about commercial confidentiality,? EFA?s Greg Taylor told ZDNet Australia. Taylor pointed out that encryption techniques are used by a lot of legitimate commercial businesses and that a crackdown would be ?totally ineffective? and a ?futile gesture? in preventing terrorism.
?Encryption is already out there, all this will affect are commercial organisations and individuals in the future who want to comply with the law. Terrorists don?t comply with the law,? Taylor said.
?It?s pointless to propose this kind of system, it will have no effect on the people who want to secretly communicate for evil purposes,? he added.
According to EFA, the US spends US$30 billion per annum on intelligence services, ?expenditure which proved to be utterly ineffective in dealing with the terrorism menace?. With the solution now to be to spend even more money on surveillance activities, ?one is obliged to question whether this expenditure is misdirected,? the EFA said.
As the EFA points out, it is as yet unproven that the Internet and encryption technology were used to facilitate last week?s terrorist attack.
Senator Gregg suggests that encryption developers be ?obliged? to provide decryption tools to government officials, but Network Associates, senior marketing manager Allan Bell believes that this would be a bad move for the Australian government to enforce.
?The problem with that is if those [decryption] tools are available, what?s to stop them being used in the wrong place?? And as far as medical and financial online information goes, ?do you really want the government to have free access to this information without knowing what restricts their access??
As Bell points out, there are those people who want to secure their data for legitimate reasons: ?You?re not going to be able to put the encryption genie back in the box.?
Bell doesn?t believe that putting restrictions on encryption will help the US government ?achieve what it wants to achieve?, saying that it may solve the 1 percent problem, but will restrict the 99 percent of legitimate encryption users.
?It?s not going to restrict the bad guys,? he said.
The EFA agrees saying that these proposals will only impact honest citizens, not terrorists. ?As the old saying goes, ?Outlaw crytpography and only outlaws will have it?,? the EFA said.
