At 06:10 PM 9/25/95 -0400, Black Unicorn wrote:

On Mon, 25 Sep 1995, John Young wrote:

...

Last week, Mr. Freeh stressed that he preferred a voluntary approach. But "if consensus is impossible" on the encryption issue, he said, the F.B.I. might consider other approaches.

I think it *tremendously* disturbing that the F.B.I. suddenly thinks itself part of the Legislative branch, able to make law and dictate policy to the rest of the country.

In fact there is a plague of this kind of thing, law making in the wrong channels, as if the executive agencies in the United States were suddenly able to implement their own law.

Today I attended the Telecommunications Conference here in Blacksburg sponsored by Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA), in which an interesting cast of characters (including Clarence Irving, Asst Secretary of Commerce for Telecommunication Policy, and presidents and Sr. VPs of Sprint, Time-Warner, GTE, Bell Atlantic) served as panelists. One purpose of the conference was to discuss the upcoming conference committee that will try to reconcile the House and Senate telco reform bills (which Boucher will likely be on). After hearing each of these folks stress the importance of competitiveness, privacy, and security, during the Q&A session I asked the panel what they thought about the likelihood of government-mandated key escrow, which the FBI and others are likely to push. Only Boucher stood up to address the question, and he offered a forceful denunciation of the entire logic of mandated escrow, citing the litany of reasons against it, including the observation that it was ridiculous from a competitiveness standpoint, noting that no foreign customers would ever buy such systems because of the fear that, among others, "the CIA would be reading their mail." He hastened to note that although he felt strongly that in the current congress the calls for mandatory key escrow would go nowhere, "things could look very different" after the next round of elections. The guy from Commerce had nothing to say on the question. rj ------------------------------------------------------------ R. J. Harvey email: harveyrj@vt.edu WWW for job analysis/personality: http://harvey.psyc.vt.edu/ PGP key at http://harvey.psyc.vt.edu/RJsPGPkey.txt