Re: Clinton's Encryption Plan Fits Law and Market

[Ernest Hua <hua@chromatic.com>]

Two serious flaws in this letter ...

1.  Secretary of Commerce, Mickey Kantor said:

> You assume that foreign buyers would not buy key-recovery products,
> but you ignore the trend -- especially in Europe -- to require use
> of key-recovery products and bar the import of stronger and stronger
> encryption products that do not take law enforcement into account.

A.  This is an old argument constantly rehashed by the government.
    What it convenient ignores is that no one OUTSIDE the government
    wants what the government schemes.  No one wants the government to
    mandate key recovery.  Some important uses of encryption, such as
    secure telephone conversations, simply do NOT need key recovery for
    ANY reason other than law enforcement intercepts.

B.  The point on other nations barring imports is absurd.  Since WHEN do
    we tailor our export limits to the import limits of OTHER nations?

C.  The so-called "trend" he refers to is ARTIFICIALLY created by the
    U.S. government through secret lobbying efforts, the most recent at
    the OECD in Paris.  The administration uses the word "trend" as if
    other nations are independently pursuing the key-escrow/key-recovery
    path, when in fact, only a few nations are considering such a move.
    Other nations, such as Japan, have openly opposed such a direction,
    and some nations, such as Sweden, have done so secretly because such
    a policy could not possibliy withstand the scrutiny of democratic
    processes.

2.  Kantor said:

> The National Research Council did not say that we should allow the
> export of all encryption.

Again, more mincing of words.  The administration, seeing that the NRC
report was staunchly against key escrow and government-mandated schemes,
chooses to ignore parts of the report it feels is convenient.

The NRC report, in fact, said that the government should immediately
relax all symmetric encryption up to 56-bits and all public domain
encryption UNCONDITIONALLY.  It did not say anything about signing a
pledge to develope key escrow or key recovery.  This condition invented
by the administration is nothing short of blackmail:  "play it our way,
or you have no chance to compete globally".



In short, Kantor's letter is yet more blatant lies and deception on the
part of the administration to get what it wants for law enforcement and
national security agencies without any concern for the nature of the 
technology nor the economic impact such policies will have.

-- 
Ernest Hua, Software Sanitation Engineer
Chromatic Research, 615 Tasman Drive, Sunnyvale, CA 94089-1707
Phone: 408 752-9375, Fax: 408 752-9301, E-Mail: hua@chromatic.com