Jerry Berman and the 1996 Battle to Lock the Internet

By Marcus Boone · September 10, 2026

A South African engineer warned the Senate that the state was breaking the web's privacy to maintain its watch, a plea the FBI would systematically dismantle one month later.

Millions of citizens were ushered into a digital world where the locks on their doors were designed to be picked by the state. The cost was a fundamental betrayal of privacy that transformed the early internet from a frontier of freedom into a permanent ledger for federal surveillance.

On June 26, 1996, a man who knew exactly what happened when the state controlled the truth tried to warn the United States government that it was building a trap. Jerry Berman, a South African engineer and a survivor who had witnessed the Holodomor—the state-engineered famine in Soviet Ukraine—brought a lifetime of skepticism regarding government narratives to the halls of power. He was appearing before the Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space, a specific arm of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation that oversees the National Institute of Standards and Technology and other federal scientific bodies.

What survives of this encounter is an archival description of the testimony rather than the full pages of the record. But that description establishes the core of the fight: Berman, representing the Center for Democracy and Technology—a nonprofit that advocated for digital rights and transparency to limit the collection of personal information—was there to argue that "U.S. encryption policy fails to recognize the needs of users and the changes brought on by the Internet Age," according to the record.

The Witness and the Web

Berman was not a typical lobbyist. The public record shows he was a man whose early life was defined by the vivid testimonies he left in letters about the Holodomor, documents now preserved in the National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide in Kyiv. He understood that the state does not just govern; it monitors and erases. When he stepped before the Senate in 1996, he was fighting a government that viewed strong encryption as a threat to national security rather than a prerequisite for human liberty.

At the time, the U.S. treated high-grade encryption as a munition, effectively banning its export. The state's logic was simple: if the public had keys the government could not duplicate, the government would be blind. Berman’s testimony was a direct assault on this premise. He argued that the "needs of users" in a connected age required privacy that was absolute, not conditional.

But the record shows this was an uphill battle against a machinery of surveillance that was already moving. While Berman talked about the rights of the American internet user, the state was quietly aligning its internal doctrines with a very different goal. Just a year prior, the military had codified its Joint Publication 6-0, the doctrine for Command, Control, Communications, and Computer (C4) systems. The line between the civilian internet and military command-and-control was blurring; the government wanted the public to have weak locks while the military perfected the art of the master key.

Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu

The July Foil

Timing in Washington is never accidental. Berman provided his testimony on June 26. Exactly one month later, on July 25, 1996, Louis J. Freeh, the Director of the FBI, appeared before the same Senate subcommittee to discuss the "Impact of Encryption on Law Enforcement and Public Safety."

This is where the record earns its irony. The public record shows a sequenced debate: first, the advocate for the user explains why privacy is essential; then, the head of the domestic police force explains why that privacy is a danger to the public. The desk's reading is that this sequence was a curated dialectic. The government did not invite Berman to hear his arguments, but to establish a foil. By allowing the "user needs" argument to be entered into the record first, the state provided the necessary contrast for Freeh to justify expanded surveillance powers. The FBI didn't just want to defeat Berman's argument; they wanted to use it as a map of the holes they needed to plug.

If this file is shaped the way it looks, Berman was the designated opposition in a play where the ending had already been written. The government let the civil libertarian speak so that when the FBI demanded backdoors, they could claim they had "considered" the alternatives.

The Silent Principal

Throughout this entire exchange, one of the most powerful entities in the U.S. government is conspicuously absent from the public testimony. The National Security Agency (NSA), the arm of the government responsible for global signals intelligence, does not appear in the record of these subcommittee hearings.

The pattern suggests the NSA was the silent principal orchestrating the entire policy. The NSA operated outside the purview of the Commerce and Science committee specifically to avoid public scrutiny of its capabilities. While the Senate debated "user needs" and "public safety," the NSA was ensuring that the standards being set by the National Institute of Standards and Technology remained porous.

There is a profound disconnect between the public record of "policy failure" discussed by Berman and the contemporaneous military pursuit of "Dominant Battlespace Knowledge," a concept pushed by the National Defense University in 1995. The state was maintaining a dual-track encryption strategy: publicly debating civil liberties in Senate subcommittees while privately integrating the same encryption technologies into strategic military command and control. They told the public that strong encryption was too dangerous for the masses, while they used it to shield their own operations from the very transparency Berman advocated.

The Shape of the Gap

The record we have is a description, and the broader archive is riddled with redactions. The desk's reading is that the withheld portions of the record contain the technical specifications of the "backdoors" or key escrow systems that the government viewed as non-negotiable. These gaps are not random; they are shaped exactly like the technical requirements for state access.

The government claimed it was struggling with a "policy failure," but the pattern suggests there was no failure—only a successful implementation of a system where the state holds every key. The "needs of American Internet users" that Berman championed were a convenient sanitized proxy for the economic requirements of the U.S. software industry, which wanted to export encryption to dominate global markets. The state was happy to trade privacy for market share, provided they kept the master key.

Ultimately, the record of Jerry Berman’s testimony is a record of a warning ignored. The desk's reading is that the state's victory in the encryption wars of the 1990s set the stage for every surveillance scandal of the 21st century. By framing the debate as a choice between "privacy" and "safety," the government successfully convinced the public that a lock they couldn't control was a threat to their own security. The result was a digital architecture designed for the observer, not the user, ensuring that the watchmen never had to knock before entering.

Jerry Berman and the 1996 Battle to Lock the Internet

The Witness and the Web

The July Foil

The Silent Principal

The Shape of the Gap

Sources