Question

Widespread use of cryptography can mean trouble for law enforcement and security personnel when crooks and spies use cryptography to secure their communications from wiretapping. Under U.S. law, communications utilities are required to provide law enforcement access to communication links when proper judicial process has been observed. Such access is useless if the messages they provide access to are encrypted with powerful security. For years the U.S. and other countries have tried to control the spread of cryptographic technologies, with little success. What should public policy be with regard to free use of cryptographic systems? What can realistically be done to implement restrictive policies?

Answer 1

Cryptography is said to be the art of secret writing. Using cryptography, plaintext is converted into non-human readable ciphertext which cannot be understood in plain sight. The 2 processes in cryptography are encryption and decryption. Encryption means converting plain text to cipher text and decryption means converting the ciphertext back to human readable and meaningful plain text. To make a message or content secure we apply cryptographic algorithms so that the message cannot be read or meaning cannot be understood by persons for which it is not meant to. Only authorized persons will have the means of decrypting the ciphertext back to plain text so that they can understand the meaning of it. When sending through an unsecured medium of transmission such as the Internet cryptographic algorithms are used to secure the transfer of messages from the source to the destination.
The widespread use of the cryptographic system means a lot of trouble for law enforcement and security personnel when the illegal activities are cause using cryptography to secure their communications from wiretapping, and thus it becomes tough for the law enforcement to detect them and decrypt the data. Under the US law, law enforcement can access communication links when the proper judicial process is applied. But such tapping is useless when access to are encrypted with powerful security. The public policy to use the cryptographic systems cannot be controlled as the users and the companies use the cryptography for their security. Thus, the only thing that can be done is that the providers should provide the law enforcement with the access such as a back-door access to wiretapping into suspects and illegal activities where the encryption would not work. This, can be realistically be done to implement restrictive policies, such as when we would want to access and wiretap the contents of somebody's voice call or some data stored in some mobile phone or any service which is encrypted on the Internet, we can ask the provider under the US law to ask for the unencrypted data.