Slashdot Mirror
Encryption Market Opening Up
MeriaDuck writes "Found this article on Cryptome,
the Clinton administration plans to announce next week that it
will permit U.S. software companies to sell their most sophisticated encryption systems to countries in the European Union without any licensing or review." Well its a start anyway.
Cypherpunks and others predicted many years ago
that the government would slowly relinquish
control over crypto as more and more of a commercial market developed.
PGP was never much more than a curiosity -- no
one used it for large-scale commerce systems,
and most of the users could be pointed to by
the government as privacy nuts or criminals.
SSL, despite inherent weaknesses, has made
crypto essential in e-commerce. The e-commerce
lobby (sites, vendors, end-users) exposed the
masses to crypto, and now depends upon crypto.
When users started demanding 40 or 128bit crypto
to keep their credit card numbers secure, that's
when crypto became widely deployed.
The next step is building crypto into the very
fabric of the Internet, in IPsec, and then making
that a "checklist item" for purchasing decisions.
Once people are only willing to buy products with
security designed in, the government will have
little choice but to allow its widespread use and
export.
(I'm waiting for encrypted cellphones, like
those being designed by Starium, to
be available...)