FITUG e.V.

Förderverein Informationstechnik und Gesellschaft

H.R. 2500

http://cryptome.org/gregg091301.txt


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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