Political Quotes

“the conference agreement on digital signatures that is going to be overwhelmingly approved tomorrow morning may be the big sleeper of this Congress, but it certainly was not the ``big easy.'' The fact of the matter is, when we started on this in March of 1999, Senator Abraham and I envisioned a fairly simple interim bill. We were looking at electronic signatures to make sure that in the online world, when you sent an electronic signature, it would carry the same legal weight as a ``John Hancock'' in the offline world. But as we prepared--after this passed the Commerce Committee--to move forward with a pretty innocuous bill, the financial services and insurance industries came to us with what we thought was a very important and thoughtful concept; and that was to revolutionize e-commerce, to go beyond establishing the legal validity of e-signatures to include electronic records, keeping important records electronically. We were told by industry--and correctly so--that this would give America a chance to save billions and billions of dollars and thousands of hours, as our companies chose to spend their funds on matters other than paper recordkeeping. At the same time, the consumer groups that sought this proposal were extremely frightened.…”