One technology, however, may have bureaucrats more uncomfortable than any other—encryption. A U.S. database expert named Patrick Ball found this out the hard way when he was in Ethiopia to help the Office of the Special Prosecutor. Ball efficiently helped build a database of crimes that had occurred under the regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam. He was accomplishing plenty. Then a bureaucratic rival started a turf war with him. The man falsely claimed that Ball had been using PGP for secret correspondence, probably with the CIA, even though the truth was a little more mundane. Ball hadn’t used PGP for anything but test messages; the people at the other end lacked the technical skills. But the rival didn’t know. He confused PGP with uuencoding—a way to prepare programs for accurate transmission via e-mail—and unfortunately the chief special prosecutor believed Ball’s accuser and forced the database expert to resign. So often that was the case with police: They displayed a mix of fear and ignorance. And they were not totally wrong to be worried. One computer expert predicted that in the next few years criminals would routinely use electronic scrambling. “This could signal the end of computer forensics,” said William Spernow, “before it even gets off the ground.” A criminal relied on a double set of books, employing PGP to conceal the accurate one, and dope-peddlers in Miami used encryption.[6.34] Not only that, just as I was writing part of this chapter, the newspapers told how terrorists in Japan had killed 10 people and injured about 5,500 by spreading nerve gas in a Tokyo subway station. Wouldn’t restrictions on encryption make such acts harder to commit with impunity? Strong counterarguments existed, however, against the jackbooters who would ban strong encryption or impose the Clipper variety on us. I would rather that nations not spy on each other. But I fully recall the naiveté of the past, the fantasy that “gentlemen do not open other gentlemen’s mail”; whether we liked it or not, espionage and counterespionage would always go on. In that spirit, instead of wasting money on Clipperish schemes, countries could spend money developing more powerful computers to crack encryption, and they could also refine the unscrambling techniques. That would not be cheap. But since bad guys wouldn’t let Clipper or successors be the apex of technology, the United States hadn’t any other choice. Other countries might feel otherwise. Bureaucrats just couldn’t contain technology. Clipperish schemes would be brainless in any country. As one alternative, governments could rely more heavily on open sources—for example, newspapers and other media outlets, especially those online. The more journalists out there, and the more independent they were, the harder it would be for nations to keep secrets and conspire against each other. The United States and friends had the most selfish of reasons for encouraging the spread of the free press.