The FBI views key recovery as the encryption solution that best assures law enforcement s ability to decipher encrypted communications subject to court-authorized wiretaps. This may be so, but using key recovery for communications runs totally contrary to the best security practices, in which deciphering keys are stored for as short a time as possible. For example, the STU-III classified telephone system, familiar to many in Congress, maintains deciphering keys only for the duration of the call. The cost of storing those keys securely, together with the increased security risk, would impose significant burdens on all users, for the sake of fewer than 2000 wiretap orders annually. I also have grave concerns over whether those are security risks to which we should be subjecting our most sensitive government communications.
Encryption poses difficult but solvable issues.
While Senators McCain, Kerrey, Hollings and others who crafted S.909 should be commended for delving into this important issue and for putting forward a proposal, that bill is not a consensus measure. Testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee this month showed that neither the Administration nor any elements of the private sector fully endorse that bill. It is time for the Administration, as well as the other interested stakeholders in this debate, to discuss the compromises necessary to find a workable, sensible solution, at last, to the encryption issue.