WHITE HOUSE WEIGHS LOOSENING LIMITS ON ENCRYPTION TECHNOLOGY.Byline: John Markoff
Under increasing pressure from Congress and the computer industry, the Clinton administration Noun 1. Clinton administration - the executive under President Clinton executive - persons who administer the law Friday proposed a series of new data-scrambling policy initiatives that it said would permit U.S. companies to compete better internationally. Administration officials said they were considering moving to liberalize lib·er·al·ize v. lib·er·al·ized, lib·er·al·iz·ing, lib·er·al·iz·es v.tr. To make liberal or more liberal: "Our standards of private conduct have been greatly liberalized . . . export controls on software used to encrypt data. They also said they were willing to work with the industry to develop an international system for managing the mathematical keys used to scramble data, making it possible for law enforcement officials to monitor messages. If the computer industry was willing to cooperate on these key-escrow systems, the officials said, the government would transfer jurisdiction over encryption products from the Department of State to the Department of Commerce. During the past three years the administration has been trying to persuade the public to support an approach to protecting the privacy of computer and telephone communications that would permit law enforcement and intelligence agency officials to continue to wiretap wiretap n. using an electronic device to listen in on telephone lines, which is illegal unless allowed by court order based upon a showing by law enforcement of "probable cause" to believe the communications are part of criminal activities. electronically scrambled messages and conversations. Originally proposed as a system known as ``Clipper Chip A cryptography chip used by the U.S. government for telephone security that used the SkipJack algorithm and provided for key escrow. The federal government tried to make CLIPPER a universal method, because it alone could unscramble the data if required using independently-stored fragments ,'' the technique would split the large numbers used to scramble data and then hold them in escrow, making them available to law-enforcement officials who have court orders, permitting them to eavesdrop eaves·drop intr.v. eaves·dropped, eaves·drop·ping, eaves·drops To listen secretly to the private conversation of others. . The insistence of the administration on moving forward on key-escrow technology appears to ignore the advice of a May report by the National Research Council, which recommended going more slowly because the technology had not yet been proved feasible. The administration policy, driven by law enforcement and intelligence agency requirements, has created bitter opposition from computer makers in the United States United States, officially United States of America, republic (2005 est. pop. 295,734,000), 3,539,227 sq mi (9,166,598 sq km), North America. The United States is the world's third largest country in population and the fourth largest country in area. , which insist that their sales are being curtailed by export controls, and by civil libertarians, who argue that Clipper would lay the groundwork for a Big Brother-style surveillance society. |
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