Political Quotes

“I am so pleased to hear my colleague talk about encryption technology because it is clearly something very important in this privacy debate. I hear with interest, as you cite that article, that one of the key things about the encryption debate is several years ago, those involved at the highest levels of government basically decided that instead of being able to break the encryption code, that maybe it would be a good idea to put an actual government chip in every computer. That was called the clipper chip. And the notion was that then the NSA and other people wouldn't have to worry about breaking the code. They would just have a government backdoor to our technology. In fact, there were many people--I kept saying you are going to say instead of ``Intel inside'' you are going to say ``U.S. Government inside'' of every computer. Is that what we were trying to do? So the clipper chip battle in the 1990s was a very famous debate about exactly how we were going to proceed on making sure that we were guaranteeing privacy to U.S. citizens. So clearly we were successful in defeating the clipper chip, but it took a lot of time and a lot of energy. So I thank my colleague for continuing to fight on these important issues. You mentioned many of the organizations that were also involved in that battle. Are you saying that now you believe there are new government efforts to thwart our encryption capabilities?”