Steven Holt: “I thank my friend from Florida for offering this amendment. It should go a long way toward recovering the lost…”

“I thank my friend from Florida for offering this amendment. It should go a long way toward recovering the lost reputation of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Mr. Chairman, this came about because the National Security Agency has a dual role of developing encryption standards and breaking encryption. The reports widely circulated and, I think, generally verified show that these two dual roles caused real problems for American standards and, hence, for American technology and American companies. It is unfortunate that NIST, which is supposed to be an impartial arbiter of national and of even global standards for technology, was effectively used to propagate defective encryption standards, and this amendment, I think, will help correct that. It is important that we keep high standards and that everyone knows it. This is an important amendment, and I thank the gentleman for offering it. I also appreciate the comments of the chair of the committee.”