Tim - It's too bad we may not see eye-to-eye on this one. For what it's worth, CDT shares your concerns about the criminal provision in the SAFE bill. We believe that as currently written, the provision is overly broad and could create a chilling effect on the everyday use of encryption, and unnecessary because it duplicates existing obstruction of justice law. We have expressed these concerns both publicly (in a letter to the committee signed by EPIC, ACLU, EFF, VTW, CDT, and over 20 other organizations - see http://www.privacy.org/ipc/safe_letter.html) and privately in conversations with the committee staff. We hope to work with the authors of SAFE to address these concerns, but, as you know, we are not running this show and have to work with what the Congress gives us. However, despite our concerns about the criminal provisions, we believe strongly that the SAFE bill, and the bills in the Senate sponsored by Burns and Leahy, are vitally important and should be passed. As you know, the debate over encryption policy reform has been going on for more than 4 years. Despite all of our efforts to promote the use of encryption, crypto is still not widely used by the public. The Clinton administration has not backed off from their commitment to a global key-escrow/key-recovery system with guaranteed law enforcement access to private keys. And despite the brilliant work of EFF on the various legal challenges to the export restrictions, we feel this issue will only be fully resolved through legislation. The status quo, in our view, is not good enough. Because of the export controls and the lack of a coherent US encryption policy, Internet users do not have access to the privacy protecting encryption products they need. Congress needs to stand up to the Administration and say, with a strong voice, "your policy is a failure - we need a different solution". That's what SAFE, Pro-CODE, and ECPA II do. Best, Jonah ** THE FIGHT FOR FREE SPEECH ONLINE IS IN THE HANDS OF THE SUPREME COURT ** Find out the latest news and information about the case, visit <http://www.ciec.org> -- <ciec-info@cdt.org> -- Jonah Seiger, Communications Director (v) +1.202.637.9800 Center for Democracy and Technology pager +1.202.859.2151 <jseiger@cdt.org> PGP Key via finger http://www.cdt.org http://www.cdt.org/homes/jseiger