McCain Open to Key Recovery Alternative

[Alan <alano@teleport.com>]

Lets try that again...

http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/5133.html


McCain Open to Key Recovery Alternative

by Rebecca Vesely 
3:06pm  11.Jul.97.PDT 

Senator John McCain, sponsor of legislation that
would create a domestic key recovery system for all encrypted
commercial transactions and personal communications, said Friday that
he is open to hearing alternatives to such a plan. 

"We are not wedded entirely to key recovery," the Arizona Republican
said in an interview. 

McCain, chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation
Committee, and Senator Bob Kerrey (D-Nebraska) introduced the
Secure Public Networks Act last month. Privacy advocates and much of
the high-tech industry oppose domestic key recovery on grounds that it
would violate civil rights and be impractical and expensive to build and
manage. 

McCain said he met with Microsoft representatives recently to discuss
a new technology being developed by the software giant that could be
less intrusive and problematic than key recovery. The senator also said
he plans to meet with Netscape officials next week to discuss yet
another alternative. 

Officials from Netscape were not immediately available for comment. 

"I'm saying, OK, if you have another solution, I'd like to hear it,"
McCain said, though he stressed that protecting national security
remains his "first obligation." 

The McCain-Kerrey bill includes provisions for setting up a voluntary
domestic key recovery system, including incentives for those who
participate. Critics say participation in the key-management
infrastructure wouldn't really be voluntary - it would be a
prerequisite to conducting electronic commerce. Encryption, or
data-scrambling technology, is widely viewed as the cornerstone to
e-commerce because it conceals credit card numbers and other personal
information traveling over networks. Key recovery, as outlined in the
bill, would create a system of certificate authorities to whom users
would give a copy of their data keys. Law enforcement could then access
that copy of your key through a court order. 

McCain's flexibility on the issue could influence the debate over how
to protect national security while allowing a free market to flourish in
the digital age. 

Just two days ago, at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the bill,
FBI director Louis Freeh testified on the need for mandatory domestic
key recovery, and some senators on the committee, notably the
chairman, Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), seemed to agree that some sort of
domestic key recovery is needed to allow law enforcement to wiretap
suspect digital communications and transactions.