The US Department of Justice has asked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider a decision that overturned export controls on encryption technology. On May 6, a three-judge panel ruled 2-1 that the source code to encryption software is constitutionally protected speech. The question before the court was whether preventing University of Illinois professor Daniel Bernstein from publishing his Snuffle software online was a violation of his First Amendment rights.
The US government says it wants to keep encryption out of the hands of terrorists and international criminals. In fact, widespread use of strong encryption will make it much harder for the US, UK, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand governments to monitor all electronic communications into and out of those nations, as they are believed to have been doing since the end of World War II.
