The politics of strong cryptography

Further, the Executive Branch is continuing its pressure to keep any realistically strong cryptography from being exported, in an attempt to keep it from being deployed domestically as well (by discouraging manufacturers from using cryptography due to the necessity to have both a domestic and a stripped-down international product).

The National Security Agency (to pick just one among many) is trying very hard to make actual privacy either illegal or hopelessly impractical, even to the extent of attempting to coerce the banking industry, which is well aware of the death of single-DES [Postscript] [PDF], to abandon a practically trivial changeover to triple-DES, in favor of an escrowed-key scheme.

Such pressure has reached particularly questionable levels when one considers that Phil Zimmerman, author of PGP, keeps getting interrogated at the airport without counsel by US Customs, despite a pending federal case against him. (You can help defray his legal expenses by contributing to the Phil ZImmerman Legal Defense Fund.)

It is interesting to note that even such well-known government players as Bobby Ray Inman state (during a talk in 6.095) that the government's handling of key-escrow issues may be politically irrecoverable because of the way the FBI has tried to force the issue.

There are many other resources on this topic. Bruce Sterling's agitprop makes interesting reading. Todd Masco has a fair collection of pointers to related topics; similar collections include Vince Cate's cryptorebel/cypherpunk page. For technical information, you might want to turn to the archives of sci.crypt, the cryptography homepage, or the Quadralay Cryptography Archive, and of course an excellent and current reference is Bruce Schneier' Applied Cryptography.