Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 21:05:31 -0500 To: fight-censorship+@andrew.cmu.edu From: declan@well.com (Declan McCullagh) Subject: Fireworks expected, missed at Senate crypto hearing Sender: owner-fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu Precedence: bulk Contrary to the Reuters report excerpted below, there weren't any fireworks at today's ProCODE crypto hearing before the full Senate Commerce committee -- at least during the first panel when the spooks testified. (I skipped out before the second, which had industry folks.) Just more of the same, though we heard less about child pornographers and more about terrorists. And Sen. Slate Gorton (R-Wash) jumped on the committee staff for leaning too far *away* from national security interests in their summary of the legislation. Most amusing point: Sen. Larry Pressler waved a copy of the floppy with the _Applied Cryptography_ source and couldn't remember what it was called. "Um, I can't export, um, this, um," he mumbled. "Cassette," he decided it was. (Even his committee staffers smirked at that.) The FBI's Louis Freeh kept mouthing the same tired old line: "No reasonable person can envision a lawless information superhighway. It was never meant to be that. We need cops there, as we need them elsewhere. The problem is the proliferation of unbreakable encryption." He said it's "not too late" to stop the spread. After the first panel ended, a gaggle of a half-dozen camera crews waylaid Freeh in the hallway outside. The FBI director fled down the stairs. The crews split into teams. Half took the elevator and half pursued on foot. Downstairs, Freeh shot through the security checkpoint into the safety of a waiting Chevy Suburban. Why were they dogging the guy? They didn't care about crypto -- they wanted a comment about the TWA flight, and Freeh wasn't talking. He didnt' mention it at all during the hearing... -Declan -------------------- Fireworks Expected at Encryption Hearing July 25, 1996 WASHINGTON (Reuter) - After sailing through two quiet subcommittee hearings, a bill to relax restrictions on computer encoding faces a much choppier ride before the full Senate Commerce Committee on Thursday. The committee will hear from some of the Clinton administration's big guns on crime and national security, including FBI Director Louis Freeh and William Crowell, deputy director of the National Security Agency. Software manufacturers and some in Congress argued at earlier hearings that current export restrictions on encryption programs -- which code and decode information -- cost American companies billions in lost sales overseas. [...] Senate bill 1726, the Promotion of Commerce Online in the Digital Era Act of 1996, would abolish most export restrictions and prohibit mandatory key escrow. Vice President Al Gore told reporters at a press conference July 12 that the proposal, known as the ``pro-code'' bill, is ``unacceptable.'' [...] Clinton administration officials have said they favor less radical reform. Officials are expected to reject the conclusions of a study released in May by the National Research Council. The council concluded that encryption export restrictions should be relaxed and rejected key escrow as unworkable. [...]