April 1997 Governments Should Respect Right to Privacy

The Organization for Economic Cooperating and Development (OECD), a 29-nation economic policy council which met last month in Paris, France, has formed a broad set of guidelines aimed at limiting the scope of government eavesdropping on the Internet, particularly electronic commerce. The non-binding guidelines fall far short of the expanded government access to encrypted communications that the U.S. Government is seeking to foil criminals who ply their trade over the Internet.

Rather than endorsing the U.S. plan, the OECD limited itself to a less specific plan. Governments were "challenged to draft cryptography policies which balance the various interests at stake, including privacy, law enforcement, national security, technology development and commerce," the OECD said. "The fundamental rights of individuals to privacy, including secrecy of communications and protection of personal data, should be respected in national cryptography (coding) policies and in the implementation and use of cryptographic methods," the guidelines continued. Governments should avoid "unjustified obstacles to the international availability of cryptographic methods."

The U.S. plan -- which has come under fire from critics who have charged that the U.S. government is threatening the privacy of individuals and corporations -- relies on a key escrow system, which is an international system of computer-security codes which would be held by government agencies and which could only be accessed after obtaining government approval. This system would allow countries access to the encryption codes used by individuals to scramble communications.

Critics fear that such government access would stifle electronic commerce and, indeed, all forms of computer network communications. The U.S. and the U.K. were the only countries supporting the key escrow system.