O'Keefe, for one, bristles at the idea that encryption tools should be made illegal or that their cryptographic secrets be exposed to authorities.
"I don't think we want to be allowing terrorists to infringe on our civil liberties," he said. "Governments shouldn't have a right to eavesdrop on what we say unless there's a reason for it."
Some point out that encryption technologies help the authorities as well as the criminals. If the technologies were compromised -- if keys to encrypted messages and piggybacked graphics were made penetrable -- then electronic surveillance measures from governments and other legitimate authorities could be under attack from criminals as well.
"Any US crackdown on personal telecommunications privacy might unwittingly hamper foreign resistance to the sort of totalitarian regimes that tend to sponsor terrorism in the first place," argues Washington Post technology expert Jon Ippolito.
Nevertheless, the actions and words of US officials in the wake of the terrorist attacks make it clear that the task of cracking data encryption methods will play an increasingly important role in efforts to thwart future tragedies. The purported use of steganography by bin Laden and associates will mean that, in the future, the electronic surveillance net will have to be case wider to include all types of data, not just e-mail.
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