---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 03:50:17 -0700 (PDT) From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> To: fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu Subject: U.S. crypto-czar appointment -- "Crypto Imperalism" in HotWired http://www.hotwired.com/netizen/ HotWired, The Netizen Global Network Crypto Imperialism by Declan McCullagh, Kenneth Neil Cukier, and Brock N. Meeks Washington, DC, 23 October The US offensive for international controls on strong encryption will soon become a fusillade. In the next week, the Clinton administration is set to create the position of a roving ambassador whose job will be to marshal international support for a controlling new US crypto policy, the Netizen has learned. The crypto-czar will lobby foreign governments to change their laws to comply with the US regulations announced on 1 October, which temporarily allow businesses to export slightly stronger data-scrambling applications if they pledge to develop a "key recovery" system. In such a system, a still-undefined "trusted third party" would hold the unscrambling key to any encryption, and could be forced to give it over to law enforcement officials with a warrant. The catch, of course, is that such a system permits continued government access to encrypted communications. But for that plan to work, an international "key recovery" framework must be established. "What we need to do very clearly is to spend a lot of time with other countries," William Reinsch, the US Department of Commerce's undersecretary for export administration, told The Netizen. Reinsch said the newly annointed crypto ambassador would be responsible for helping these countries move "in the same direction" as the US by "helping facilitate that process and helping to reach any agreements that need to be reached between us and them." Reinsch said the position would defy the label "crypto-czar," because the position isn't "a czar in the policy sense.... We don't envision this person as one who would be giving a lot of speeches on the subject and operating as a kind of public defender of the process." Rather, the person would work within "a context which is largely private, not public," Reinsch said. The president can confer the rank of ambassador on a political appointee for up to six months without Senate confirmation, the State Department said. And with ambassadorial rank, the czar will be able to speak for the president. The administration is currently considering a "short list" of candidates "in the low single digits," drawn from current government employees and private citizens, Reinsch said. If a current government employee is chosen, he or she would be at the ambassadorial level, he said, and the crypto duties would simply become an additional responsibility. If chosen from the private sector, it will be someone with "significant stature," Reinsch said. That person would have "a close association with the administration and the president and would be viewed by the other countries as a senior representative who could speak for the president with some confidence," Reinsch said. If a private citizen is chosen, they would "do it for free and we'd pick up the travel I guess." The announcement should come "fairly quickly," he said. "I would hope next week we could ice this one." This bypasses the ongoing public debate in Congress over lifting crypto export controls through legislation - Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Montana) has pledged to keep fighting next year - and in the OECD, says Marc Rotenberg, the director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "This is backdooring the backdoor." While others - notably Clint Brooks and Mike Nelson - have played the role of crypto spokesperson before, this move represents a redoubling of the administration's plans to impose its will internationally. Yet international observers say the United States may find its plans thwarted in the global arena, where many governments - already uneasy about America imposing its hegemony on regional politics - will likely resist another cryptocrat, even if the person comes with an ambassador's honorific before his or her name. "Europe would consider that unacceptable and arrogant, no question," says Simon Davies, director of Privacy International and a fellow at the London School of Economics. "There would certainly be a backlash, and it would cause immense suspicion. This whole business has become extremely sleazy, and the Americans appear to have taken it all very personally. I would be very surprised if it was taken seriously here." Viktor Mayer-Schvnberger at the University of Vienna Law School, an expert on international crypto policy, said that "if the US ups the ante and brings in a sort of a quasi-diplomatic person to push European countries further, I think we'll see tremendous arm-twisting." "It may backfire," says Mayer-Schvnberger. "The US put tremendous pressure on Europe and that is going to increase if the US government makes such a bold move as to appoint someone to do nothing but lobby for key escrow." Many countries, he said, "have been very apprehensive of the US coming in as the 'big guy' and telling the world what is good and what is bad" regarding encryption. ###