This one-year US-France dissertation enhancement award supports collaborative research between graduate student, Randi Smith Bessette of the University of Maryland, and Thierry Vedel of the French National Foundation for Political Science. Ms. Bessette is a student of Ernest Wilson, Director of the Center for International Development and Conflict Management at the University of Maryland. Ms. Bessette will spend three months in France investigating the development of French policies regulating encryption. Encryption, the technology that employs mathematical formulas to secure data and communications, is a controversial public policy issue. Long under the exclusive purview of the intelligence community during the Cold War, encryption now represents a flashpoint of modern conflict among scientific, business, national security/law enforcement, and civil libertarian communities. Public demand for encryption has multiplied with the spread of the personal computer and the development of the Internet. With a shift of activity into the private sector, governments worldwide are trying to decide whether and how to control this technology. In the early 1990s, France implemented one of the strictest encryption control policies in the world, whereby the import, export, and domestic use of encryption were heavily regulated by the government. In 1996 France gradually relaxed these restrictions. The objective of the research is to examine first-hand what influenced the recent changes in French government policy. Using France as a case study, the project will examine the political relationship between government and the scientific community and broad international political and economic factors reshaping modern state-scientist relations.
