Administration Floats Digital Encryption Plan

WASHINGTON —  The Clinton administration is circulating a proposal on Capitol Hill designed to ensure that the government can read data and messages that have been scrambled.

The proposal, a bill regulating the computer software “keys” that unscramble encrypted data, has drawn criticism from businesses and advocates of privacy.

The proposal would appear to be at odds with the work of the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which is expected to announce today its own guidelines on so-called cryptography after two years of negotiations.

Despite U.S. attempts to get the organization to approve guidelines that would be more consistent with Clinton administration policies to allow government access to scrambled communications, the OECD has decided against a key management plan similar to the administration’s proposal.

Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based advocacy group, said the OECD decision shows that “there’s a huge difference between what [the Clinton administration] wants to get and where the rest of the world seems to be right now.”

Stewart Baker, a former counsel to the National Security Agency working with the government, said that “the U.S. clearly would have been happy to get a stronger endorsement of law enforcement interests” from the OECD but that “they succeeded much more than the language that will be released tomorrow suggests.”

Jerry Berman, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a high-tech policy group, said the Clinton administration’s proposed bill “indicates that our government is clueless on what to do about security on the Internet.”

Berman and other critics Wednesday argued that the bill would make it too easy for the government to get access to private information.

Encryption, used to protect computerized information, has been one of the most contentious battles in the high-tech field for the Clinton administration. Advocates of strong encryption call it a necessity for privacy and security in the digital age. But law enforcement officials have warned that strong encryption will provide a haven for criminals and terrorists to work in secrecy.

Opponents expressed the strongest concerns about a provision that would allow law enforcement to get access to these keys based on as little as “a written authorization in a form to be specified by the attorney general.”

In contrast, obtaining permission to conduct a wiretap or a search requires a tougher standard: that law-enforcement officials get permission through a court order.