Congressional Pro-Encryption Efforts In Danger

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.

January 13, 1998, TechWeb News

Congressional Pro-Encryption Efforts In Danger
By John Borland

SAN FRANCISCO -- Congressional efforts to pass protections for the sale and use of strong encryption in the United States may still be killed by law enforcement lobbyists, pro-encryption lawmakers said on Tuesday.

"We're in a fluid situation," said U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), at the 1998 RSA Data Security Conference in San Francisco. "It is essential for people online to get much more active than they have been. This has to be a much more broad-based issue than it has been."

Lofgren, U.S. Sen. John Ashcroft (R-Miss.), and U.S. Rep. Robert Goodlatte (R-Va.), the primary sponsor of the pro-strong encryption Security and Freedom Through Encryption (SAFE) Act, said opposition from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and national security lobbyists still posed a serious threat to the bill's passage.

The SAFE Act is said to protect citizens' right to use and sell strong encryption, and bars the U.S. government from requiring citizens to give their private encryption keys to a third party. An encryption key is a numeric code that is combined with text to create encrypted text for security purposes.

"Anytime we're dealing with anybody who claims that legislation threatens national security or law enforcement, we have to take that seriously," Goodlatte said. "But we have nothing to apologize for," he said. "This is a pro-law enforcement measure."

The SAFE bill had at last count roughly 250 cosponsors -û or more than half the members of the U.S. House of Representatives, said Goodlatte, who introduced the SAFE legislation in 1996.

The bill didn't start to gain momentum, however, until the House's 1997 session. But after several successful committee votes, lobbying efforts by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies temporarily turned the tide against the bill.

Two committees passed a modified version of the measure that would bar U.S. sales of strong encryption without key escrow, which is a security technique that places a cryptographic key into the hands of a trusted third party.

Encryption supporters managed to block the FBI amendments in another version of the bill, which passed the Commerce committee on Sept. 29. The bill will be taken up on the House floor sometime in the spring, Goodlatte said.

Ashcroft said he would hold hearings on the issue next year in the Constitutional subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary committee, once Goodlatte's bill passes the House.

"We'll make an effort to bring additional information and balance to the debate in Washington, D.C.," he said. "The constitution of the U.S. must be respected."