In a world wherein video cameras increasingly spy on the unsuspecting in nearly every public room, George Orwell's 1984 has arrived only a few years late. Why does the Federal Bureau of Investigation insist on its right monitor the Internet unhindered? Why do FBI agents alone think themselves capable of deciding who gets to use technical wizardry to assure personal privacy and who doesn't? Who'll be allowed to protect their own on-line business transactions and who'll be denied this capability?

Merchants doing business on-line believe that using the strongest encryption devices should also be their prerogative. If, as the law enforcement demands, banks alone are permitted to conduct on-line business, Internet businesses would, many assert, wilt.

While this emerging struggle captures nervous imaginations, a lesser known phenomenon is also unfolding. On-line security systems are being called into doubt, according to reports in the New York Times, a print medium that persistently encourages doubts about Internet transactions.

"The Times hates the competition it gets—for advertising dollars and audiences alike," says Arnold Meyer, an Internet specialist, "that jealous newspaper has been running one Internet-bashing story after another!"

The Clinton Administration is presently considering whether or not it should follow the lead of the FBI and require an almost total refusal to export encryption technology except to a chosen few among the planet's moneylenders.

Internet companies, appalled by the President's relationship to Big Brother, are applying pressure to the government to multiply rather than to restrict the spread of encryption devices. Jim Bidzos, president of RSA Data Security believes that "this whole Internet commerce explosion is starting to make it harder to grease the squeaky wheels."

Thus, Internet business interests are in peril if police and the banks win.

Microsoft's George Spix thinks that Internet companies are likely to get government permission to own encryption technology on a case by case basis. Last year the Clinton Administration transferred the granting of such "a right to own" from the State Department to the Commerce Department.

Banks, according to William A. Reinsch, Under Secretary for Export Administration are now actively fighting expanded definitions under which Internet companies would share with them the ability to scramble outsiders' attempts at surveillance.

In their greed-motivated attempts to harness the new technology to assure nothing more than their own survival, major banking institutions would deny technical prowess to software companies, securities firms and newly developed Internet commerce.

"Bank is a four letter word," says Meyer, recommending an all-out tactical war on the moneylenders and their FBI supporters.