The Economic Times reports that, after months of back-and-forthing, RIM seems ready to hand over encryption keys for the ubiquitous Blackberries to the government of India.

RIM uses 256-bit encryption, but the Indian “government’s decryption software can decode messages encrypted only up to 40 bits.” So if law enforcement can’t crack your security through the front door, then it’ll just ask your security provider to leave open the back door.

Law enforcement has been stymied by encryption from the beginning. Control of encryption keys was the goal of the Clipper Chip, which was promoted by the Clinton White House in 1993. Basically, the U.S. government wanted to require that every device that might use encryption – phones, computers, etc. – install the Clipper Chip, because the government would have the keys and could “with appropriate legal authorization” unencrypt any device that used the Clipper Chip. No one really knew what “appropriate legal authorization” would be.

There was a huge public backlash. The Clinton government promoted a couple of other, equally invasive versions of the plan, but the Clipper Chip ended up disappearing. Score one for privacy and civil liberties.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 and is filed under Civil liberties, Fourth Amendment, International, Security, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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