Case 2.5 Encryption Source Code and the First Amendment
Peter Junger is a law professor at Case Western University in Cleveland, Ohio. He maintains a Web site that includes course material, and he sought to post on that Web site encryption source code that he had written to illustrate how this technology worked. Data encryption is nothing more than the use of a secret code to ensure that confidentiality is not breached when a message is communicated. It works by relying on an algorithm that translates a plain text message such as “we will invade tomorrow" into some sort of unintelligible cipher text can be translated into something intelligible is by means of a key, which is available only to the recipient of the message. There are many commercial software products that enable users to encrypt their massage, but Junger had written his own encryption program.