WASHINGTON, D.C., -- A year after the Clinton administration convened its Key Escrow Alternatives Working Group to find alternatives to its failed Clipper chip encryption scheme, the computer industry is pushing to get the organization off dead center.
Last week a group of hardware makers sent Vice President Al Gore a letter urging administration actions to liberalize export controls on equipment with imbedded encryption technology. Gore has been the "point man" for the administration on exports and encryption.
Early last year, faced with solid industry opposition to the FBI-sponsored Clipper chip proposal, Gore wrote a letter to then-Rep. Maria Cantwell proposing to work with industry. The working group was a follow-up to the Cantwell letter.
The software industry quickly followed the hardware folk, with a letter to Gore on the letterhead of the Business Software Alliance (BSA) and signed by Bill Gates of Microsoft, Jim Manzi of Lotus and IBM, Keith Bentley of Bentley Systems, Robert Frankenburg of Novell, Mark Hoffman of Sybase, Carol Bartz of Autodesk, and Alok Mohan of the Santa Cruz Operation.
"More than a year has gone by since your letter to Rep. Cantwell," says the BSA letter. "Our companies are still not able to export software with encryption strengths readily available in programs and products from other sources. We also do not know any more about what we need to do to develop software using key escrow encryption which can be exported and which is internationally salable.
"The widespread availability of programs employing (data encryption standard) or its equivalent from foreign vendors, the Internet and domestic sources (transferred abroad via public telephone line and computer modem) continues to put us at a competitive disadvantage," said the letter. "We believe the time for further study is over. We ask for immediate action to liberalize export controls to permit the inclusion of DES-level encryption in generally available software programs so that in the short run we can at least maintain our international position."
Under current government restrictions, many software products sold in the US cannot be exported unless the encryption is removed. This restriction, for example, prevents export of the popular Lotus Notes program.
Under the original Clipper plan, the government would have held the two parts of the encryption key, which would have been available to law enforcement agencies with a warrant. FBI Director Louis Freeh has been a strong advocate of this approach.
After the bombing in Oklahoma City, the FBI circulated a program in Congress that would have banned domestic use of encryption except for those systems that had a government backdoor.
In another attempt to get the Clinton administration moving on the issue, the Software Publishers Association and the American Electronics Association are holding a joint meeting on cryptography policy in Washington this Thursday. "We're looking for ways to move the ball forward," says Ken Wasch, SPA executive director. "Stalemate on this issue impedes competitiveness."