Burns Prepares To Reintroduce Encryption Bill

Disclaimer: This information comes from sources that cannot be verified. As such, make no assumptions about its completeness or accuracy. We endeavor to keep this information up to date as much as possible. Feel free to send comments/ updates to the Security News Editor.

01-28-97, Newsbytes:

Burns Prepares To Reintroduce Encryption Bill

Washington, DC, -- By Bill Pietrucha. Montana Senator Conrad Burns (R) said this morning that he will again introduce legislation in the next few days to ease government restrictions on encryption and to override the Clinton Administration's encryption plan.

"Almost four years ago, the Clinton Administration announced that its plan to help secure the massive amounts of information we move electronically was to give government a direct peephole into that information," Burns said this morning. "Four years later, the President has not budged from this position."

Burns noted that "a significant bipartisan coalition in Congress and in the private sector has consistently rejected that approach," but fell short in the last Congress "because of White House obstructionism."

"This time around," Burns said, "we intend to put a bill on the President's desk and find out if he is truly on the side of the users and providers of rapidly expanding high-tech goods and services."

Burns announced the legislation along with cosponsors Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and with US Representative Bob Goodlatte (R-Virginia), who is sponsoring a companion bill in the House, in a video conference with the RSA Data Security Conference in San Francisco.

Burns' Pro-CODE, or "The Promotion of Commerce Online in the Digital Era Act" would ease export restrictions on encryption technology to a level deemed "generally available" worldwide by the US Department of Commerce.

It also would prohibit a mandatory system under which producers or users of hardware and software would be required to surrender a decoding "key" to a third party.

An executive order signed by President Bill Clinton would ease export restrictions to a level of 56 bits for applicants who agree to give up a copy of their deciding keys.

"This debate comes down to a potential loss of billions of high-tech dollars and thousands of high-tech jobs," Burns said. "It comes down to significant harm to our global high-tech competitiveness, and to whether or not government can force people into making business and consumer choices and whether government should have access to our most private communications."

(19970128/Press Contact: Matt Raymond, Office of Sen. Conrad Burns, 202-224-8150.)