Law enforcement groups have suggested that the terrorist groups associated with devastating attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon used encryption to communicate securely over the internet.Republican senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire has already called for the government to be given backdoors into all encryption products. In a speech just days after the strikes, Gregg said that software companies "should understand that as a matter of citizenship, they have an obligation" to include backdoors in their applications.But experts say that trying to control encryption may be a waste of time and effort. Terrorists are, they say, far more likely to use steganography, which involves obscuring messages from detection in the first place, as well as straightforward codeword-based messages."If I was a terrorist, the last thing I would do is use encryption," says Brian Gladman, a UK computer scientist. "We need to find out whether encryption was used in these events at all."
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