OPERATIONAL SECURITY OF UBIQUITOUS INFORMATION - Cyberwar-Netwar: Security in the Information Age - page 103

DISCUSSION OF PART II:
OPERATIONAL SECURITY OF UBIQUITOUS INFORMATION
Lt.General Mateus da Silva
with contributions from Dr. A. Erez, Dr. M. Valente, Col. D. Handy, Dr. D. Stanley, Prof. S. Azarov, Prof. S. Kolobov,
Prof. B. Heurlin, Maj.General L. Vellone, Dr. C. Mounier, Mr. G. Kahraman
Mateus da Silva : This debate is on Part II of the workshop, “Operational Security of
Ubiquitous Information”. We had presentations from Dr. Uneri on “Securing Networks
in the Information Age” and from Dr. Amaral on “Operational Security of Ubiquitous
Information”. My suggestion is that we should try to make a cross-debate instead of
asking questions to the speakers.
Valente : I would like to continue with my last question on the current status of
cryptography. I do not know if the various countries could give us or could give me, in
this case it is personal curiosity, what currently is the status of cryptography in each
country, and in terms of NATO, what is its current position on the use of cryptography?
Is it illegal or is it legalised to a certain level of cryptography? I would be curious to
know what happens in France, Israel, Turkey and Ukraine. I would be very interested to
know the current position on cryptography.
Vellone : It is a very interesting question, but it was put some years ago, and there has
been much discussion of the problem in Europe, the United States and some Far Eastern
countries, including Singapore. At the same time the main problem was related to
criminality. The criminal element was using cryptography to protect their information
and business. So some countries started to introduce the concept to limit cryptography.
There was a strong debate about that. Some countries moved ahead, for example, im
France, where the use of the cryptography if not authorised by the government was
prohibited on the basis that only some particular cryptographic levels should be used.
Immediately afterwards Belgium also followed the same approach, but there was a public
outcry about this new law, and many nations came back to leaving cryptography free. I
have known personally of the limitation against crytography in nations. Because of new
hypermedia communications, it is very hard to see what individuals are doing. That
means you cannot intervene when people can lose their random data in order to disguise
traffic flow. To my knowledge, all nations have stopped limitations. The US at first was
limiting some strong crytographic algorithms for commercial purposes but now allows a
lot of new cryptographic tools.
Aharoni : I can speak for the current up-to-date situation in the US and in Israel which
is very similar. We have followed very closely the restrictions which originated in the
US. The main reason was that most eavesdroppers were encrypting and restricting the
NSA and other organisations; this is why the US tried to limit the usage of encryption
around the world. Generally speaking the US gave up on this restriction around 2001