Excerpts from an NYT article on bills by Leahy and Goodlatte regarding
Gov't crypto measures. It's really unclear on exactly what these
bills do and don't do, though -- hopefully EPIC or a similar
organization will post further news on this soon.
-H
--
The New York Times, March 4, 1996, p. D4.
Compromise Bills Due on Data Encryption
Industry Opponents and Civil Libertarians Are Lukewarm,
at Best
By John Markoff
Legislation will be introduced in the House and the Senate
tomorrow in an effort to break the deadlock between the
computer industry and the Clinton Administration over the
control and export of software and hardware used to
scramble electronic data.
So far, though, the proposed measures have received only
cautious endorsement from industry executives, while
civil-liberties and privacy groups say they are worried
that the bills would enable the Government to decode
scrambled transmissions.
Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and
Representative Bob Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia, plan
to introduce similar bills that affirm the right of
Americans to use any type of data-coding equipment without
restriction and prohibit the mandatory use of special keys
that would allow law-enforcement agencies to read scrambled
data. Their bills would also make it a crime to use
encryption technology in committing a crime and would
permit the export of data-coding software and hardware if
similar technology was available from a foreign supplier.
<...>
The proposed legislation would ease some current
restrictions on the exporting of data-coding systems, but
civil libertarians still see areas of concern.
"The bills relax export controls, which is clearly a step
in the right direction," conceded Marc Rotenberg, director
of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington
research and policy organization. But the negatives, he
said, were that the bills opened the door to Government
access to private transactions "and criminalize the use of
cryptography when it is used to perpetrate a crime."
Industry officials said they expected the legislation to
stir little enthusiasm from corporate users. "Corporate
America is absolutely unwilling to give a third party
control of their data," said Jim Bidzos, chief executive of
RSA Data Security, a maker of encryption software based in
Redwood City, Calif.
