Encryption is a means by which a digital message can be coded so that only a recipient with the proper “key” can decode and understand the message. Encryption technology, in fact, has gotten so good that it has raised serious concerns that messages will become unbreakable, thus putting all manner of criminal activity -- from child pornography to espionage to organized crime communiqués -- beyond the ability of the government to investigate. To address these concerns, the Clinton administration is currently advocating a key recovery approach called KMI (key management infrastructure), which
is designed to allow law enforcement to have access to encrypted digital messages on an international basis.

The other side of the debate is typified by privacy advocates and e-commerce interests, who feel that the government wants to expand, not just preserve, its ability to eavesdrop, and that fledgling mediums like the Internet will never become economically viable if the people using it don’t feel that their privacy is protected and their data secure.   There are also concerns about the potential for government abuse of any kind of key recovery program, or that the key recovery program would itself be insecure, incomplete, and the target of infiltration and hacking. There is an international aspect to encryption as well, for any artificial stricture on the complexity of encryption software (so that the government can still break it, should it want to), or which reduces its security (by placing copies of keys in some sort of an escrow account), ultimately devalues the software and leaves other countries without such restrictions to develop industry standards and much better products. Finally, there is a question as to whether the kind of messages the government wishes to intercept and decode, would ever be transmitted on a system which belonged to the key recovery program, if other non-recoverable systems were still available to criminals.