WASHINGTON -- Few things are so inconvenient as the facts. Just ask the lawyers at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

There, a cadre of top-shelf attorneys have worked on and off since the mid 1970s to craft policy to control the export of technologies essential in keeping Internet traffic private and secure. Those restrictions, of course, harm Internet security worldwide and do little anyone can see to help cops and spies keep an eye on the bad guys.

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Either way, export controls hinge on one fundamental premise: Foreigners don't have access to the same sort of high-quality data scramblers that Americans do. The White House knows this isn't true. But admitting it may mean losing face. Unless, of course, events force its hand.

That, in a roundabout way, is exactly what is happening with development of the Advanced Encryption Standard at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in suburban Washington, D.C.

NIST has called for submissions for the AES, a 256-bit standard that is theoretically trillions of times more difficult to crack than the old Data Encryption Standard that NIST developed in the 1970s with IBM (NYSE:IBM) and the National Security Agency.

It's odd how two-thirds of the competitors in the World Series of cryptography aren't American.

Of 15 submissions received, only five are from the U.S. The others hail from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Costa Rica, England, France, Germany, Israel, Japan and Korea. When five finalists emerge in the next two weeks, the consensus is that two, maybe three, will be American. No one I've talked to thinks the U.S. will sweep this list.

It's odd how two-thirds of the competitors in the World Series of cryptography aren't American. Odd, too, how some of the world's top computer security companies -- names like Check Point Software Technologies, Data Fellows, Elvis+ and Fortress -- are in far-off lands such as Israel, Finland and Russia, yet they sell their goods right here in the U.S.

Just 10 years ago, Bush-era bureaucrats said there were no encryption products available outside the U.S. A few years later, after private-sector studies proved that wasn't true, the feds changed their story. In fact, they explained, there was such a thing as overseas crypto. Problem was, it wasn't any good.

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Now, engineering bodies such as the Internet Engineering Task Force continue to develop nonproprietary cryptography over the Net, even as the U.S. government pretends it can stop software developers from "exporting" the code everyone knows they're sharing among themselves anyway.

Bruce Schneier, one of the 15 contestants in the NIST competition and author of the best-selling "Applied Cryptography," lays out the facts in this month's Crypto-Gram newsletter.

"The U.S. not only does not have a lock on cryptographic research, it does not even have the majority," he says. "A Swedish company called COST built a comprehensive cryptographic tool kit. The company was acquired by Entegrity Solutions, a U.S. start up. Algorithmic Research, and its cryptographic products, was acquired by Cylink. Elvis+, a Russian company, is now part of the U.S. company TrustWorks. RSA Data Security, now owned by Security Dynamics, recently purchased the rights to a cryptographic product created in Australia."

The once-bitter debate over cryptography has grown strangely quiet over the past few months, court cases notwithstanding. Instead of recriminations, both sides now choose low-key statements that evince surprisingly little conflict. A settlement that allows U.S. companies to export strong crypto code almost seems possible.

After all, undeclared presidential candidate Al Gore, meanwhile, would love dearly to rehabilitate his image with much of the high-tech world. With this issue, Gore has an opportunity to prove he is the savant of the info superhighway he says he is. And he can get some mileage on the fund-raising trail.