Last year, Representative Maria Cantwell took on the national-security establishment by introducing a bill in the US Congress to relax the existing Draconian controls on the export of encryption software. Backed by an eclectic mix of computer-biz bigwigs, hackers, and civil libertarians, the 35-year-old Democrat from Washington state began negotiating directly with Vice President Al Gore. In late July, when Gore announced the administration's dramatic about-face on the Clipper Chip and signaled a willingness to work with industry and privacy advocates on a solution to the encryption problem, he did so in a letter to Cantwell. "She went eyeball-to-eyeball with the White House," said Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft Corporation's vice president for advanced technology. "And they blinked."
That Myhrvold could be found kissing up to Cantwell is no surprise. Microsoft sits in the very heart of Cantwell's leafy suburban Seattle district, which is also home to a slew of other high-tech firms from Nintendo to McCaw Cellular. It's not surprising that Cantwell styles herself as a pro-business, pro-green Democrat.
In Washington, her involvement in the encryption debate has earned her a different sort of reputation - as the first congressperson from cyberspace. Yet despite her success so far, the job is far from complete: Clipper may be dead, but absurd software-export controls remain. Sure, Gore is newly committed to some reasonable principles - that any US encryption system should be voluntary, exportable, unclassified, et cetera. But Cantwell's lobbying may still be required to ensure that economic sense prevails over spook-sponsored paranoia. Hear, hear.
ELECTRIC WORD
CyberRep Sinks Clipper!
