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Clinton signs bill to count wiretaps that encounter encr

------- Forwarded message follows ------- Date sent: Thu, 04 May 2000 08:07:02 -0500 To: cryptography@c2.net From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> Subject: Clinton signs bill to count wiretaps that encounter encryption

****** Wiretap stats from 1999: http://www.uscourts.gov/wiretap99/contents.html Clinton statement: http://www.politechbot.com/docs/clinton-crypto.050300.html ******

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,36067,00.html U.S. to Track Crypto Trails by Declan McCullagh (declan@wired.com)

3:00 a.m. May. 4, 2000 PDT WASHINGTON -- President Clinton has authorized the federal government to begin keeping track of how often suspected criminals use encryption to thwart police wiretaps.

Clinton has signed a bill that requires the Justice Department to report how frequently it encounters encrypted conversations. Over 2,450,000 telephone conversations were legally intercepted in 1999, according to government statistics released this week.

The president signed the measure Tuesday and said it would require only summary statistics. "The reporting requirement ... does not require specific case-by-case or order-by-order reporting, which could jeopardize law enforcement sources and methods and provide clear direction to criminals seeking to use encryption to hide their unlawful conduct," he said in a statement.

Depending on how widespread encryption has become, the results of the annual survey could help the arguments of privacy advocates, who say police fears are exaggerated, or boost the claims of law enforcement officials, who have pressed for limits on data-scrambling products.

[...]

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