Seventy-two percent of Americans believe that anti-encryption laws would be "somewhat" or "very" helpful in preventing a repeat of last week's terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. The poll, which was conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates on 13 and 14 September, reveals that the question of banning encryption tools without "backdoors" for government interception is now a serious matter of debate in the United States.
Congress was quick to blame sophisticated encryption methods for the massive intelligence failure last week, and is now proposing that government officials should have "backdoor" access to encryption products to aid national security.
The Princeton survey found that more than half of the American public (54 percent) would support anti-encryption laws in order to aid law enforcement surveillance powers. Only 9 percent of those questioned believed that tighter crypto restrictions would not prevent similar terrorist attacks in the future.
How dumb are those Americans? They don't support encryption and they want to have backdoors into everything. I can't wait to hear what they have to say when a whole bunch of their credit card numbers turn up on the internet because someone access though the backdoor...