by Stewart Baker
[email protected]
Michael D. Hintze
[email protected]
July 1997
This article was originally published in the Spring 1997 edition of The Canadian Law Newsletter (a publication of the Committee on Canadian Law, Section of International Law and Practice, American Bar Association).
Introduction
Encryption, the process of converting information into an unreadable form by the application of mathematical formulae, has become in recent years a highly controversial subject of government regulation. On the one hand, law enforcement and national security agencies are concerned about criminals and terrorists being able to encrypt communications and data so that, even if intercepted, they would be unreadable. On the other hand, the growth of the Internet and electronic commerce have created a market demand for encryption products that can make electronic communications secure - and industry is anxious to meet this demand.
