Encryption
Encryption sounds like a good idea, but how could it harmful to us?
Encryption, is the process of altering readable data into unreadable form to prevent unauthorized access, and it is what has given people confidence to do online shopping and banking. Encryption is clearly useful for some organizations, especially those concerned with trade secrets, military matters, and other sensitive data. Recently, many financial organizations, such as Bank of America, Time Warner, and Citigroup’s CitiFinancial division, stung by misplaced data of nearly 6 million people, decided to encrypt the backup tapes of customer information that they store with third party vendors.
A very sophisticated form of encryption is used in most personal computers and is available with every late-model web browser to provide for secure communications over the internet. However, from the standpoint of society, encryption is a two-edged sword. For instance, the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon raised the possibility that the terrorists might have communicated with each other using unbreakable encryption programs. (There is no evidence they did.) Should the government be allowed to read the coded email of overseas terrorists, drug dealers, and other enemies? What about the email of all American citizens?
The U.S. government has maintained that it needs access to scrambled data for national security and law enforcement. Indeed, during the 1990s, officials urged that encryption companies be required to include a “back door” in their products that would allow the government to peek at messages exchanged by criminals and terrorists. Companies and consumers said they would not use such a product and contended that criminals surely would not either, It was also argued that many people with the most basic education in mathematics could write their own encryption systems. Ultimately, the back-door idea was dropped.
The 2001 terrorist incidents resurrected the debate. Some academics who, over the objections of the government, had freely published their research on how to make unbreakable codes were haunted by the idea that law enforce-ment might have figured out terrorist plans if the encryption techniques had been kept secret. Although publicly available encryption allows ordinary people to protect their privacy and businesses to protect their data, it is clear that a by-product is limitation on the ability to fight lawbreakers and terrorists.
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