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Canada Frees Up Crypto

by Matt Friedman 
11:46 a.m.  1.Oct.98.PDT

http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/15362.html

In a move that will almost certainly create friction between the US
and Canada, the Canadian government has released a new cryptography
policy that encourages the proliferation of powerful data-scrambling
technologies. 

The policy, announced Thursday by John Manley, the minister of
industry, makes it clear that Canadians will not have to submit to
mandatory key recovery, which would give the government access to
all scrambled communications. The document also heads off the
establishment of a national public key infrastructure. 

"In terms of domestic policy, it couldn't be better," says David
Jones, president of Electronic Frontier Canada. "Industry Canada is
essentially saying that, domestically, you can pretty much do
whatever you want with cryptography." 

An American civil liberties advocate was similarly impressed. 

"It is great. It's a policy for the 21st century, as opposed to the
US government's policy update from last week, which is too little,
too late," said Susan Landau, a cryptography policy expert and the
co-author of Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and
Encryption. 

Canada's new policy is a setback to the country's "signals
intelligence" spy agencies. Industry Canada had been under
considerable pressure from the intelligence and law-enforcement
communities, both at home and in the United States, to establish
domestic crypto controls. 

"The US has sent a number of delegations to Canada, a number of
times, to try and convince [the Canadian government], to go with a
restrictive view," said David Banisar, policy director of the
Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, DC. 

"The Canadians clearly said they were not interested." 

Last winter, when Ottawa published a public white paper on
cryptography and solicited comments from the public and other
branches of government, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service
said that it was pushing for a public key-recovery plan. 

The CSIS is concerned both with domestic and foreign intelligence,
sort of a combination of the FBI and CIA. 

"The ability to decrypt messages and data has a significant impact
on our ability to monitor security threats to Canadians," said CSIS
spokeswoman Marcia Wetherup at the time. Reached for comment
Thursday morning, Wetherup said, "That continues to be the service's
main concern at this time." 

While the Canadian government has rejected controls on domestic
crypto, it is taking a wait-and-see attitude on exports. In the US,
cryptography exports are strictly regulated, on the grounds that the
technology might be used to conceal the communications of terrorists
or hostile nations. 

"The Commerce Department is not going to be happy," Landau said. 

But the Commerce Department's special envoy for cryptography said
that Canada and the US were in synch on the crypto issue, and that
the policy was good news for both countries. 

"We were pleased with the policy and consider it congruent to US
policy and in line with our recent announcement," said David Aaron. 

"We have been in close consultation with the Canadians -- they are
trying to strike the same type of balance that we are in terms of
law enforcement and national security concerns," said Aaron. 

Under the new policy, Ottawa will continue to work within the
framework of the Wassenaar Arrangement. That document, an
international treaty limiting the spread of munitions technologies,
is currently being renegotiated. 

Sunny Handa, a cyberlaw specialist with the Montreal law firm
Martineau Walker, points out that the new policy will not alter
existing regulations governing the export of Canadian crypto
technology or the re-export of technology originating in the United
States. 

"The real issue now is export," he says. "That hasn't changed." 

The new policy does, however, make the point that the Canadian
government will "deter the use [of crypto] in the commission of a
crime," and in the concealment of evidence. Moreover, existing
search-and-seizure laws will apply to encrypted messages. But Handa
says that Industry Canada is simply "throwing a bone to the police."

"Our search-and-seizure laws are pretty good right now," he says.
"Citizens' rights are protected, and law enforcement officials can
do their jobs. If Industry Canada has signaled that it's happy with
them, we probably won't see new legislation in this area for years." 

"One way to view the issue of cryptography is as an issue of crime
prevention, rather than crime detection," said Landau. "As we enter
the wired world, cryptography will become extremely important to
crime prevention, and the Canadians recognize that." 

Links:

http://info.ic.gc.ca/cmb/welcomeic.nsf/558d63659099294285256488005215
5b/85256613004a2e1785256690004c70fb?OpenDocument

http://efc.ca/


------------

- Canada Frees Up Crypto
    In a move that will almost certainly create friction between the US
    and Canada, the Canadian government has released a new cryptography
    policy that encourages the proliferation of powerful data-scrambling
    technologies. 
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