US looks at cracking down on encryption software

Proposals have been submitted in the US Senate which could see tighter restrictions placed on the use of encryption software. The FBI believes that encryption software was used by the perpetrators of last week's attacks on New York and Washington to circumvent US intelligence agencies.16 Dec 2000

On Thursday, US Senator Jude Gregg proposed a campaign for a global ban on encryption software which does not allow individual government agencies to have decoding access. Senator Gregg believes that individual intelligence agencies should have decoding access were the matter under investigation to be deemed important in terms of national security.

These proposals will be strongly opposed by privacy advocates in the US.

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