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[NEWS] U.S to Follow EU Crypto Lead

------- Forwarded message follows ------- Date sent: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 09:52:07 -0400 From: Andrew Shen <shen@epic.org> Subject: [NEWS] U.S to Follow EU Crypto Lead To: gilc-plan@gilc.org Send reply to: gilc-plan@gilc.org

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,36788,00.html

U.S to Follow EU Crypto Lead by Declan McCullagh

3:00 a.m. Jun. 6, 2000 PDT WASHINGTON -- If the European Union votes next week to relax encryption regulations, the United States says it will take similar steps.

Commerce Department Undersecretary William Reinsch said Monday that any change, designed to make sure American high-tech companies aren't disadvantaged, will have to wait until the Europeans reach a decision.

"In order to make the best move, we must wait until after the EU makes theirs on June 13th. An announcement will come, must come after the EU's announcement," Reinsch told the annual meeting of the Computer and Communications Industry Association in Washington.

The European Ministers of Foreign Affairs is expected to vote on June 13 to dramatically relax export controls. The panel last month delayed a scheduled vote on the proposal, citing too many items on the meeting's agenda.

American businesses have complained, individually and through lobby groups like Americans for Computer Privacy, that being subject to more restrictive regulations than their competitors places U.S. firms at a competitive disadvantage.

Industry executives, including Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, will trek to Washington on Wednesday for an annual lobbying session that includes a focus on encryption. Some firms, like Hushmail and Zero Knowledge Systems, have lured American cryptographers abroad.

The expected change in encryption regulations would make it dramatically easier for European countries to export encryption technologies, used in network security and privacy-protecting hardware and software.

Reinsch said that any change in U.S. regulations, which can be done without congressional action, should address cryptographic interfaces to existing programs.

He has said recently that the United States is not obliged to be as liberal as European governments when it comes to crypto-relaxation.

Other speakers at the CCIA event included Orson Swindle, a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission.

Swindle, a free-market voice at the FTC, said industry should be encouraged to handle its own privacy problems.

If websites draft their own privacy policies, that increases competition for users, and federal legislation "may actually reduce the level of choice of privacy policies available to the consumer," Swindle said.

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