[FYI] H.R. 2500

["Axel H Horns" <horns@ipjur.com>]

http://cryptome.org/gregg091301.txt

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19 September 2001

By telephone yesterday Brian Hart of Senator Gregg's office said that 
the senator had no plans at the present to introduce legislation 
revising law governing encryption. Telephone: 202-224-3324.  

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[Congressional Record: September 13, 2001 (Senate)]
[Page S9354-S9359]
>From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access 
[wais.access.gpo.gov]
[DOCID:cr13se01-99]


DEPARTMENTS OF COMMERCE, JUSTICE, AND STATE, THE JUDICIARY, AND 
RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2002  

       A bill (H.R. 2500) making appropriations for the
     Departments of Commerce, Justice, and State, the Judiciary,
     and related agencies for the fiscal year ending September 30,
     2002, and for other purposes.


[Excerpt]

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Hampshire. Mr. GREGG.  

[...]

So we have to recognize that in a period of war, which is what I 
think everyone characterizes this as, and which it truly is, we are, 
as a nation, going to have to be willing to be more aggressive in the 
use of human intelligence, and we are going to have to allow our 
agencies in the international community to be more aggressive.  

Equally important, we, as a nation, because of our natural 
inclination and our very legitimate rules relative to search and 
seizure and invasion of privacy, have been very reticent to give our 
intelligence communities the technical capability necessary to 
address specifically encoding mechanisms.  

The sophistication of encoding mechanisms has become overwhelming. I 
asked Director Freeh at one hearing when he was Director of the FBI-- 
and I remember this rather vividly because I didn't expect this 
response at all--what was the most significant problem the FBI faced 
as they went forward. He pretty much said it was the encryption 
capability of the people who have an intention to hurt America, 
whether it happened to be the drug lords or whether it happened to be 
terrorist activity.  

It used to be that we had the capability to break most codes because 
of our sophistication. This has always been something in which we, as 
a nation, specialized. We have a number of agencies that are 
dedicated to it. But the quantum leap that has occurred in the past 
to encrypt information--just from telephone conversation to telephone 
conversation, to say nothing of data--has gotten to a point where 
even our most sophisticated capability runs into very serious 
limitations.  

So we need to have cooperation. This is what is key. We need to have 
the cooperation of the manufacturing community and the inventive 
community in the Western World and in Asia in the area of 
electronics. These are folks who have as much risk as we have as a 
nation, and they should understand, as a matter of citizenship, they 
have an obligation to allow us to have, under the scrutiny of the 
search and seizure clauses, which still require that you have an 
adequate probable cause and that you have court oversight--under that 
scrutiny, to have our people have the technical capability to get the 
keys to the basic encryption activity.  

This has not happened. This simply has not happened. The 
manufacturing sector in this area has refused to do this. And it has 
been for a myriad of reasons, most of them competitive. But the fact 
is, this is something on which we need international cooperation and 
on which we need to have movement in order to get the information 
that allows us to anticipate an event similar to what occurred in New 
York and Washington.  

The only way you can stop that type of a terrorist event is to have 
the information beforehand as to who is committing the act and their 
targets. And there are two key ways you do that. One is through 
people on the ground, on which we need to substantially increase the 
effort-- and this bill attempts to do that in many ways through the 
FBI--and the other way is through having the technical capability to 
intercept the communications activities and to track the various 
funding activities of the organizations. That requires the 
cooperation of the commercial world and the people who are active in 
the commercial world. That call must go forth, in my opinion.  

[...]

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