IN BELGIUM , ENCRYPTION FORCE RISES...
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A 600 year-old university in Leuven Belgium , has become an unexpected battleground in the fight between privacy advocates and those who think governments and law enforcement need more powerful online surveillance .
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Tucked in the woods outside this medieval Dutch-speaking Flanders , the electrical-engineering department of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven is home to the Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography group or COSIC .
Led by Bart Preneel , a cryptography professor and outspoken privacy stalwart , the group has grown over the last 15 years into one of the world's top research centers for digital encryption .
Mr. Preneel is considered a hero by privacy advocates who see encryption as a way of keeping out the prying eyes of governments and police .
Dan Boneh , who heads the applied cryptography group at Stanford University's computer -science department , calls Leuven a " powerhouse of cryptography ."
But critics see Mr. Preneel and some of his work at Leuven as a threat , worried that today's explosion of readily accessible encryption software is making it harder for law enforcement andgovernments to thwart or track down perpetrators of crime and terror .
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Mr Preneel bristles at characterizations that he is somehow working at cross purposes with law enforcement or governments .
" I'm not of the WikiLeaks principle that everything should be
open , " he said in a recent interview , referring to the group that has published reams of classified government documents in recent years .
" Governments need to do some things in secret . On the other hand , citizens need to be able to do some things in secret legitimately ."
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Encryption , which protects online communication and data from being intercepted , has become a key component of today's digital economy .
It is also a crucial safeguard against hacking for more gadgets , from cellphones to cars .
But government intelligence agencies and law-enforcement officials fear sophisticated encryption can get in the way of detecting crime and terrorism .
Governments and corporations , meanwhile , have sought to develop or buy the best encryption around to protect their own secrets or products . Some of them have come to Mr.Preneel for help . His labs are partly self-financed , with the rest coming from the Belgian government .
Packed with hardware and laptop-wielding students in jeans and sneakers , they develop new encryption for corporate clients , or test their in-house antihacking technology .
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Some clients are longer term , others come for specific issues .
The lab has done work for Dutch chip giant NXP ,Sony Corp , and Unilever Group , he says .Sony and Unilever didn't respond on requests to comment .
Mr Preneel also said Intel Corp. is partly funding his lab's research into how to shield different apps on a smartphone so that they can't steal data from eachother , or siphon off data from the phone's user .
Intel didn't respond on requests for comment...
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BLOGGER'S COMMENT ON THIS STORY...
We live in " strange times "..right ?
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