Clinton Administration Backs Away From FBI on Encryption
          
                              BY AARON PRESSMAN
          
      WASHINGTON   -  The  Clinton  administration's  top  official  on 
      encryption policy Thursday backed away from  a  proposal  by  the 
      head  of  the  FBI to regulate for the first time computer coding 
      products in the United States.
          
      "What he proposed was not the administration's policy,"  Commerce 
      Undersecretary William Reinsch told reporters during a break at a 
      congressional hearing.
          
      FBI  Director  Louis  Freeh's   comments   Wednesday   before   a 
      subcommittee  of  the  Senate  Judiciary Committee sparked strong 
      criticism from civil liberties groups and the software industry.
          
      U.S. law strictly regulates the export  of  encryption  products, 
      which   can  be  used  to  scramble  information  and  render  it 
      unreadable  without  a  password  or  software  "key."   But   on 
      Wednesday,   Freeh   proposed  mandatory  controls  on  currently 
      unregulated coding products intended solely for domestic use.
          
      "The administration has been very clear to the director  that  he 
      has an obligation to tell the Congress what's in the interests of 
      law enforcement, and he  did  that,"  Reinsch  explained.   "That 
      doesn't mean he was speaking for everybody."
          
      Freeh  said makers of encryption products should include features 
      that would allow the government to crack any message.
          
      Without such capabilities, criminals, terrorists  and  pedophiles 
      could  use  encryption  to  hide  their  communications  from law 
      enforcement agencies, Freeh said.
          
      But software companies maintain  that  Freeh's  plan  would  make 
      their  products  less attractive and make all electronic messages 
      less secure. Civil liberties groups said  mandatory  controls  on 
      domestic  encryption  might  violate constitutional guarantees of 
      free speech and privacy .
          
      Under the FBI director's proposal, all encryption products  would 
      have  a feature allowing government access to coded messages, but 
      users could disable or avoid using the feature.
          
      Some senators wanted to go further.  Sen.   Dianne  Feinstein,  a 
      California  Democrat,  proposed requiring all users of encryption 
      to enable the back-door access feature. Freeh  said  such  a  law 
      would  be the best solution for law enforcement but added that he 
      did not think it was politically viable.
          
      Reinsch said Freeh's proposal was also unlikely to pass.
          
      "If the committee were to report that (bill out),  I  think  that 
      would  be  something  we  would look at very seriously," he said. 
      "But I don't expect that to happen. We have  not  asked  them  to 
      report that and we are not going to ask them to report that."
          
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