To facilitate that goal, Reinsch said, the government will begin purchasing new software and hardware that will communicate only with other key-recovery systems -- that is, with systems that allow the police a key to unscramble encrypted files.
Reinsch's comments, at a Capitol Hill forum on the increasingly controversial issue of computer encryption, drew criticism from the audience of mostly computer, software and business interests who questioned whether the government should be using tax dollars to force unwanted technology and a "de facto standard" on the rest of the world.
"We see companies wanting to engage in a key-recovery framework for their own security reasons," Reinsch said. "We see the market going in that direction anyway. What we have tried to do is devise a set of policies that facilitate that movement."
He added, "If private parties want, they can ignore key recovery -- unless they want to communicate with us in an encrypted fashion."
Reinsch said his department had already begun talking with computer and software companies about what key-recovery technology is out there and was hoping to put out a proposal for such purchases at the end of the year. Reinsch, undersecretary for export administration at the Department of Commerce made the statements as he tried to clarify what some perceive to be a constantly shifting administration policy on encryption. The Clinton Administration earlier this year said that it backed an easing of current export controls but wanted to set up a domestic key-recovery system that would give law enforcement agencies access to the codes used to secure computer and Internet communications.
But Louis B. Freeh, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, last month began pushing for and won House committee approval of a law requiring that all domestic data-scrambling software have a "back door" key that would give police, with the a court order, access to all encrypted computer files. And on Monday, Clinton's top Internet policy adviser, Ira Magaziner, bluntly told the High Tech Forum in Amsterdam that the administration has no encryption policy at present. "I'm not a good enough politician to talk my way around it," Magaziner said in a speech.
"I am," Reinsch said Wednesday, and he insisted that the administration's policy not only exists but is unchanged. He said the administration had never backed Freeh's plan but had merely given him the freedom to push what he thinks is best for law enforcement.
"We have not proposed, and have no plans to propose, domestic controls," Reinsch said.
As for Magaziner's comments on Monday, Reinsch said: "I think he was alluding to the fact that there are obviously differences of opinion. I think what Ira was also referring to is that we haven't exactly convinced everybody that we are right, and in a situation where you are implementing a policy and are finding a lot of objections to that policy -- particularly on the Hill when you are trying to l Reinsch was the lone participant in support of encryption controls at the workshop, which was sponsored by the Economic Strategy Institute and the Computer and Communications Industry Association. He appeared on a panel with Representative Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Markey was the author of a compromise that kept Freeh's domestic control proposal from passing the House Commerce Committee after being adopted by the House Intelligence Committee. That vote, Markey said, was "one of the rare instances where the debate actually swayed votes."
Markey urged the chief executives of the nation's top software companies to get involved as the House Rules Committee debates compromises to the House encryption bill. As originally introduced by Representatives Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican, and Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, that bill would ease export restrictions and pro
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