Can our cell phones, laptops and pagers ever really be secure? Or are our phone calls, the data on our hard
drives, and the messages that we receive inevitably going to be an open book for any suitably motivated government spy-or teenaged hacker?

Certainly, nothing can ever be 100 percent protected. Sadly, though, the makers of portable computing devices and wireless communications systems have led us down a false path by failing to make security a top priority. For more than a decade, cryptographers have possessed strong encryption techniques that could virtually guarantee that data falling into the wrong hands-through a stolen laptop, say, or an intercepted radio signal-would be impossible to decode. Unfortunately, these techniques have not made it from the lab into the mainstream.

As a culture, we have little experience with secure communications-and a lot of experience with communications security gone sour. Time and again, wireless equipment vendors and providers have been shamed by the security failings of their products. The analog cellular telephone systems of the early 1980s lacked any protection at all; a $200 scanner from Radio Shack would let you listen in on anybody's cell-phone conversation.

Rather than endow their products with strong encryption, the wireless companies turned to Washington for help. The result was the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which effectively made it illegal to listen in on cellular-phone calls. But the legislation didn't stop snooping: after the law's enactment, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Virginia governor Douglas Wilder and even Prince Charles all had their wireless communications intercepted.