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Taking Account Of The World As It Will Be: The Shifting Course Of U.S. Encryption Policy, Tricia E. Black

Federal Communications Law Journal

Encryption, understood on a basic level as the process of scrambling information to disguise its content, has been a topic of intense debate over the past decade because of Internet growth and well-founded concerns about online security. The encryption debate centers on striking an appropriate balance between national security concerns and the potential prosperity of the high-tech industry. The Clinton Administration played an important role in relaxing U.S. encryption policy. This Note argues that the dramatic shift in encryption policy resulted from a recognition of how the world will be in the digital age, and that strong, unregulated encryption technology …