In an 11th-hour push to derail a market-friendly encryption bill, the FBI is floating a proposal mandating a digital surveillance system that would give real-time access to all encrypted communications. As part of this lobbying effort, FBI Director Louis Freeh will meet with the full House Commerce Committee this week in a classified briefing.
The FBI proposal would require manufacturers of encryption products to install a key recovery feature into all software - regardless of whether it will be sold domestically or sent abroad. This marks a departure from the Clinton administration's current policy of requiring a key recovery option within two years for exports of software equipped with 56-bit or stronger encryption.
"Obviously we can't support anything like this," says Peter Harter, global public policy counsel for Netscape. "The FBI has gone beyond even their previous efforts."
The FBI proposal would also require "real-time" decryption of scrambled data. This requirement for instantaneous decoding, privacy advocates say, would severely curtail the strength of encryption US citizens would be able to use.
"It would create a national surveillance infrastructure," said Jonah Seiger of the Center for Democracy and Technology. "Every encryption user would be forced to participate."
The proposal will likely surface this week in two of the three committees still scheduled to mark up the Security and Freedom through Encryption Act, a bill that does the exact opposite of what the FBI wants by relaxing current export controls on encryption and banning a domestic key recovery system. The three committees yet to vote on SAFE are National Security, Intelligence, and Commerce.
Although the bill, sponsored by Representative Bob Goodlatte (R-Virginia), now enjoys a full House majority with 251 co-sponsors, few supporters of the bill sit on either the National Security or Intelligence committees. A majority of the Commerce Committee (31 out of 52) supports the bill, and both the FBI and industry leaders have stepped up their lobbying efforts of committee members in recent days.
If any of the three committees were to accept the amendment, it could be offered as a substitute to the Goodlatte bill. Then, the House Rules Committee would decide whether to accept the alternative for a full House vote. Although such last-minute substitutes are often rejected by the Rules Committee, and 11 of the 13 members of the Rules Committee are co-sponsors of SAFE, the committee's chairman happens to be Representative Gerald Solomon (R-New York). Solomon withdrew his support for SAFE last April, citing national security concerns.
