Constitutional Conflicts with Encryption Regulation

The government's need to control and have access to information has resulted in attempts to regulate the use of strong encryption over the Internet. The government argues that national security requires this control to stop terrorists, child pornographers, and drug traffickers from preventing government access to online communications. These regulations fail to take into account the history of encryption as a military and National Security Agency tool, and encryption's subsequent entrance into the public and private sphere. Regulation and control isolate the Internet as a form of communication and target it in ways that would not be allowed in other media. The controls in place and suggested are overly intrusive without showing adequate justification for being so, and affront current notions of First Amendment and privacy rights. The focus of this thesis is to describe the evolution of encryption from military to private use, and the failure of government regulations to recognize and adapt to that change. The thesis argues that government refusal to allow strong encryption for non-military Internet communication cannot be justified.Air Force Inst of Tech Wright-Patterson AFB OH is the author of 'Constitutional Conflicts with Encryption Regulation', published 2001 under ISBN 9781423528289 and ISBN 142352828X.