September 17, 2001 -- Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH), speaking in the
U.S. Senate on Thursday, proposed tighter restrictions on software
that scrambles electronic data and often hinders a government's
ability to obtain valuable criminal intelligence. Gregg is now calling
for "backdoors" in encryption products, proposing that
U.S. government officials have access to decryption tools when the
case is deemed to be a matter of national security.
Senator Gregg's statement, excerpted from the Congressional Record,
follows:
"We have to set aside our natural inclination as a democracy
to limit the type of people we deal with in the area of human
intelligence. Unfortunately, the CIA in the 1990s was essentially
limited and defanged, for all intents and purposes, in the area
of human intelligence gathering because the directives and the
policies did not allow us, as a nation, to direct our key intelligence
community to basically go out and employ and use people who were
individuals who could give us the information we needed. Because
of our reticence as a democracy to use people who themselves may
be violent and criminal, we found ourselves basically sightless
when it came to individual intelligence.
So we have to recognize that in a period of war, which is what
I think everyone characterizes this as, and which it truly is,
we are, as a nation, going to have to be willing to be more aggressive
in the use of human intelligence, and we are going to have to
allow our agencies in the international community to be more aggressive.
Equally important, we, as a nation, because of our natural inclination
and our very legitimate rules relative to search and seizure and
invasion of privacy, have been very reticent to give our intelligence
communities the technical capability necessary to address specifically
encoding mechanisms.
The sophistication of encoding mechanisms has become overwhelming.
I asked Director Freeh at one hearing when he was Director of
the FBI--and I remember this rather vividly because I didn't expect
this response at all--what was the most significant problem the
FBI faced as they went forward. He pretty much said it was the
encryption capability of the people who have an intention to hurt
America, whether it happened to be the drug lords or whether it
happened to be terrorist activity.
It used to be that we had the capability to break most codes
because of our sophistication. This has always been something
in which we, as a nation, specialized. We have a number of agencies
that are dedicated to it. But the quantum leap that has occurred
in the past to encrypt information--just from telephone conversation
to telephone conversation, to say nothing of data--has gotten
to a point where even our most sophisticated capability runs into
very serious limitations.
So we need to have cooperation. This is what is key. We need
to have the cooperation of the manufacturing community and the
inventive community in the Western World and in Asia in the area
of electronics. These are folks who have as much risk as we have
as a nation, and they should understand, as a matter of citizenship,
they have an obligation to allow us to have, under the scrutiny
of the search and seizure clauses, which still require that you
have an adequate probable cause and that you have court oversight--under
that scrutiny, to have our people have the technical capability
to get the keys to the basic encryption activity.
This has not happened. This simply has not happened. The manufacturing
sector in this area has refused to do this. And it has been for
a myriad of reasons, most of them competitive. But the fact is,
this is something on which we need international cooperation and
on which we need to have movement in order to get the information
that allows us to anticipate an event similar to what occurred
in New York and Washington.
The only way you can stop that type of a terrorist event is
to have the information beforehand as to who is committing the
act and their targets. And there are two key ways you do that.
One is through people on the ground, on which we need to substantially
increase the effort--and this bill attempts to do that in many
ways through the FBI--and the other way is through having the
technical capability to intercept the communications activities
and to track the various funding activities of the organizations.
That requires the cooperation of the commercial world and the
people who are active in the commercial world."
