Software Chiefs Lobby U.S. to Drop Encryption Effort

Computer industry captains called on President Clinton on Wednesday to drop efforts to regulate data-scrambling technologies, but the FBI warned that such a move would cripple law enforcement and leave the country more vulnerable to terrorism.

In meetings with leaders in Congress, the news media and Vice President Al Gore, the software executives, including Bill Gates of Microsoft Corp. and Andy Grove of Intel Corp., also pushed to halt software piracy overseas.

In an open letter to Clinton, the corporate chiefs said U.S. competitiveness in electronic commerce is at stake in the encryption debate.

“Network users must have confidence that their communications, whether personal letters, financial transactions or sensitive business information, are secure and private,” they wrote.

Access to computer programs with strong data-scrambling, or encryption, capabilities is “critical to providing this confidence,” they said.

The annual lobbying trip is the latest evidence of the high-tech industry’s increasing push to influence public policy on a wide variety of issues.

Though the industry’s early years were marked by an aversion to Washington, Gordon Eubanks Jr., chairman and chief executive of Symantec Corp., said such visits are increasingly important as the government is faced with a series of crucial decisions that could affect development of the Internet and electronic commerce.

Even as they argued at a news conference against export controls on encryption programs, FBI Director Louis Freeh told Congress that the U.S. is at a “historical crossroads” on the issue.

“Uncrackable encryption will allow drug lords, terrorists and even gangs to communicate with impunity,” Freeh told a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on the FBI.

He said the government needs a kind of mathematical “key recovery” system in which a spare key, or decoder, for encrypted information is held in escrow by a trusted third party.

“Other than some kind of key recovery system, there is no technical solution,” Freeh said. He said the widespread use of strong encryption without an escrowed key “will devastate our ability to fight crime and prevent terrorism.”

In their letter to Clinton, the computer chiefs said governments should not impose import or export controls on encryption products nor “attempt to force use of government-mandated key management infrastructures.”

Although no laws stop Americans from using any type of data-scrambling program within the United States, regulations let companies export only a relatively weak form of encryption.

Earlier this year, the Clinton administration began allowing companies to export stronger encryption technology so long at it involved a spare key, possibly even held outside the United States. Congress is considering several bills, strongly backed by the software industry, to all but eliminate the export controls.

Others signing the letter to Clinton were the heads of Adobe Systems, Autodesk, Bentley Systems, Compaq, SCO, Symantec, Claris, Digital Equipment, Lotus Development, Novell and Sybase.