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Clinton's Top Internet Adviser Says U.S. Encryption Policy Is Unformed

By MARTIN NISENHOLTZ

AMSTERDAM -- President Clinton's top Internet policy adviser acknowledged Monday that the administration lacked a firm position on the controversial issue of encryption. "We don't have a position" at present, Ira Magaziner, Clinton's senior adviser for policy development on the Internet, told representatives of 21 nations, mostly European, gathered here for the annual High Tech Forum.

Magaziner found himself caught between the President's recent support of a bill that would allow U.S. law enforcement agencies access to coded messages and his own hope that "we will resolve this in a way that will allow encryption to go forward."

"We have not been able to get a reasonable consensus in the United States," Magaziner said of the encryption debate now under way in Congress.

The administration has backed the position taken by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency, both of which have aggressively lobbied Congress for laws requiring that anyone who scrambles computer files be required to give the police a back-door key to unlock those files. Civil liberties groups and most of the computer industry have fought that position, arguing that it would be expensive, a grave security risk and a threat to privacy rights.

"I'm not a good enough politician to talk my way around it," Magaziner said of the administration's evolving stand on the issue.

Magaziner had attended the forum to lobby for the market-driven approach to Internet economic policies that the administration outlined on July 1.

Describing the Internet as "an engine of growth for the world economy," he argued that "the private sector should lead the development of the Internet."

"We want to come together with other countries as equal partners, with the private sector leading and government playing a supporting role," Magaziner said. "Our approach is not to have a trade negotiation. By 2005, at least 1 billion people will be on the Internet. If 40 million Frenchmen aren't there, that's their problem."

Not everyone in the room of mostly Internet entrepreneurs agreed with the United States' position. Caroline Nevejan, Director of The Society for Old and New Media, asked, "How do we protect the old, the sick and the poor?"

Magaziner responded by saying that he was "a democrat" and believed in a government role but that the decentralized nature of the Internet called for a mostly market-oriented approach. He also pointed out that the Clinton administration had committed to wiring every school and library in the United States.

After the speech, Nevejan commented, "It means that the richest country with the biggest market gets all the power."

Magaziner took The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to task for what he characterized as sensationalizing negative aspects of the Internet. An analysis of the newspapers' front-page coverage of the global computer network in the last year, he said, revealed that the four most popular words or phrases in such articles were "drug deal," "stalker," "bomb maker" and "pornography." Such coverage, he asserted, had led to a popular image of the Internet that was fundamentally skewed and that made arguing for market-driven solutions difficult.

During his 20-minute speech, Magaziner outlined the principles of the Administration's strategy and the issues it raised. Among other things, he suggested that the Internet be structured as a "tariff-free zone" and that technical standards evolve in the marketplace.

Monday's speech was not the first time Magaziner had strayed from an official administration position on the Internet. Last spring, he went on record opposing the Communications Decency Act, a law supported by the administration and signed by Clinton in February 1996 that criminalized the publishing of "indecent" material in any part of cyberspace accessible to minors. The law was ruled unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court last June.

"Now that the CDA is dead," Magaziner told his audience on Monday, the administration wants to "empower people" to filter out unwanted content with screening software.

The High Tech Forum, sponsored by Esther Dyson's EDventure Holdings, is in its eighth year. The theme is "Business on the Net: A New Market Emerges."

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