Public Policy Tradeoff

Posted: October 12th, 2015

By James Lewis

James Lewis is a Senior Vice President and Program Director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Before joining CSIS, he worked at the Departments of State and Commerce. He was the advisor for the 2010, 2013 and 2015 United Nations Group of Governmental Experts on Information Security and has led a long-running Track II dialogue on cybersecurity with the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations.

When the Clinton Administration decontrolled encryption in the late 1990s after a long and acrimonious debate, it did so because it had decided that the benefits of making strong encryption available to internet users, and the benefits to U.S. companies operating in a global market, outweighed the cost to law enforcement and intelligence agencies, whose ability to collect internet communications would be reduced. The White House decided that secure communications and a strong U.S. Information Technology (IT) industry were worth the price.

In practice, the damage to collection from the 1990s decision turned out to be minimal. Very few people actually used encryption, because it was an added expense, difficult to implement, and made computers slow. Free access to encryption was not a problem, and the spread of the internet created a “golden age” for signal intelligence agencies.

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