President Clinton has authorized the federal government to begin keeping track of how often suspected criminals use encryption to thwart police wiretaps. Clinton has signed a bill that requires the Justice Department to report how frequently it encounters encrypted conversations. Over 2,450,000 telephone conversations were legally intercepted in 1999, according to government statistics released this week. Depending on how widespread encryption has become, the results of the annual survey could help the arguments of privacy advocates, who say police fears are exaggerated, or boost the claims of law enforcement officials, who have pressed for limits on data-scrambling products. All rights reserved.
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This was all done with Frontier 7.0.1 and BBEdit on a Macintosh .