House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Representative Bob Goodlatte, R-Virginia, toured Silicon Valley on Tuesday, promising to loosen restrictions on the encrpytion industry. Meanwhile, a bill before Congress threatens their progress, critics said.
According to some observers, HR 2281, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) bill, threatens to make cryptographic research -- the very basis of the data-scrambling and computer-security industries -- illegal.
"The anti-circumvention language of [the WIPO bill] is extraordinarily broad and will have all sorts of unintended consequences," Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, noted in a 5 June hearing before the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications, Trade, and Consumer Protection.
Gingrich was somewhat cagey when asked whether the legislation, which he supported, might in fact eradicate many of the political gains made by advocates of strong data protection.
"I personally want to protect honest hobbyists [who try to crack encryption codes]," the Georgia Republican said. "But I don't want to see a law that will protect counterfeiting."
The WIPO bill specifies that "no person shall circumvent a technological protection measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."
Further, the legislation would make it illegal to circumvent a technological protection or "descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological protection measure, without the authority of the copyright owner."
Bruce Schneier, a cryptographer and the author of Applied Cryptography, puts the case more succinctly: "Many of us learned engineering by poking around in our computers, figuring out how things worked," he said in an email to Wired News.
"Kids who wanted to grow up to be security engineers would be committing crimes by learning," he said of the bill.
