Cryptography & Liberty 1999: An International Survey of Encryption Policy

A country-by-country survey of encryption law and policy compiled by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) on behalf of the Global Internet Liberty Campaign (GILC), documenting the legal status of cryptography in seventy-six national and territorial jurisdictions as of 1999.

Most countries surveyed, industrial and developing alike, imposed no controls on the use, manufacture, or sale of cryptography. The report found a broad international trend toward relaxing what restrictions did exist. It also tracked a parallel rejection of key escrow and key recovery schemes, the approach then favored by the U.S. government. France had recently dropped its own escrow requirement, and other governments were declining to adopt one. Only a small number of countries, the report noted, kept strong domestic controls on cryptographic use. The survey updated an earlier 1998 report of the same title by Wayne Madsen, David L. Sobel, Marc Rotenberg, and David Banisar, published as a law-journal article. A further edition, Cryptography and Liberty 2000, followed it.

EPIC is a Washington, D.C. public-interest research organization focused on privacy and civil liberties in the information age, founded in 1994 by Marc Rotenberg and David Sobel. Through the late 1990s it was a leading participant in the U.S. cryptography-policy debate. It opposed the Clinton administration's Clipper Chip key-escrow initiative and export controls on strong encryption, and published this survey as part of its broader case against criminalizing encryption technology.