In January of 1999, Vice President Al Gore spoke at the National Conference on Global Governance where he announced a pilot program for college students under which they will be able to use the Internet to get combined government and commercial services. Wagner was the keynote speaker at the E-Gov conference held in July of 1998. His presentation highlighted governments efforts towards making purchases from suppliers electronically, and making government services available to the public via the Internet. NIST is coordinating with industry and technical groups developing PKI technology to foster interoperability of PKI products and projects. But strong encryption is a double-edged sword.
Law abiding citizens can use strong encryption to protect their trade secrets and personal records.
But those trade secrets and personal records could be lost forever if the decrypt key is lost. Depending upon the value of the information, the loss could be quite substantial. Encryption can also be used by criminals and terrorists to reduce law enforcement capabilities to read their communications. Key recovery based encryption can help address some of these issues. The Administration is also working with Congress to ensure legislation is enacted that would facilitate development of voluntary key management infrastructures and would govern the release of recovery information to law enforcement officials pursuant to lawful authority.