ABSTRACT
The increased use of encryption in the 1990s by private business to protect trade and financial services has raised concerns about the ability of governments to fulfil their responsibilities for security and law enforcement. Cryptography is the practice of scrambling messages to make them unreadable except by authorized recipients. When applied to electronic communications and stored data, this practice is termed encryption. Until the 1970s encryption had been used solely in the military and diplomatic services. As international trade increasingly relies on telecommunications and computers and more than 90% of these information technologies lie in the civilian sector, a large commercial market for encryption products outside the military and government security services is beginning to emerge. In 1994, military messaging networks used only about 1 % of the world’s encrypted communications.1
