San Francisco

AN elite group of code makers and code breakers is taking American and British intelligence and law enforcement agencies to task in a new paper that evaluates government proposals to maintain special access to encrypted digital communications.

On Tuesday, the group - 13 of the world's pre-eminent cryptographers, computer scientists and security specialists - were to release the paper, which concludes that there is no viable technical solution that would allow the US and British governments to gain "exceptional access" to encrypted communications without putting the world's most confidential data and critical infrastructure in danger.