(1) SENATOR BURNS ANNOUNCES BILL TO LIFT CRYPTO EXPORT CONTROLS The battle to roll back the Clinton Administration's encryption policy escalated on Thursday when Senator Conrad Burns (R-MT) announced that he will introduce a new proposal to repeal restrictions on encryption exports and to encourage the growth of electronic commerce. Senator Burns announced the bill via a teleconference during a special session at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference in Boston, MA. The bill, titled the "Promoting Commerce On-Line in the Digital Age Act" (PROCODE), joins two recent bills introduced earlier this month (S. 1587 and HR 3011) designed to encourage the development of strong, easy-to-use privacy and security products for the Internet.

Maybe I'm just naturally suspicious of the government about such things, but I'm wondering where the text of this new Burns bill has gotten off to. It's been days since it was first described, and yet a recent trip to the CDT page still claims it's coming. Well, is there a bill or isn't there? As usual, my solution will cause some people to smile, while others will frown: We should educate these politicians that whenever they claim they have a bill to introduce, at the very least they should be required to release a secure hash of their CURRENT draft version of the bill, as it sits in the word processor. Later, when the finalized bill is complete, they will be required to release the intermediate edit (whose hash can be checked against that originally announced) to prove that they did, indeed, have a specific bill in mind. It would also allow all citizens to see how that bill changed (if at all) between the time they CLAIMED the bill existed, and the time it is actually released in finalized text version. (If we REALLY don't trust the politicians, we could insist that the text of that proposed bill be released into the hands of one of these supposedly-trustworthy escrow agents they seem to want US to use, which instructions to release it in, say, 2 weeks maximum come hell or high water. All these instructions, plus the hash, will be immediately released.) This requirement would drastically cut down on the kind of game-playing that may be going on regularly when a bill is claimed to be ready to introduce, but actually isn't. It would prevent the politicians from "running it up the flagpole and seeing if anyone salutes" without that being later revealed. They could still change their bills, but all of their changes will become documented, and thus potentially politically incriminating. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com