[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 101 (Wednesday, July 10, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7507-S7508]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                 TRUST

  Mr. BURNS. Mr. President, over the Fourth of July, I guess our break 
was taken a little bit differently. Due to circumstances of a personal 
matter in both my wife's family and my family, we did not get to spend 
as much time in our home State of Montana as we would have liked.
  Generally, a couple rides on an airplane, but basically we drove 
across this Nation, across the heartland of this Nation, all the way 
from the Rocky Mountains back to Washington, DC.
  But I flew into California. We were talking yesterday about the 
encryption issue, an issue that allows people to encode their messages 
that are sent on the information highway and that there is some 
reliance that those messages are only received by the folks they are 
intended for, and when the folks receive those messages, they have 
confidence that it was sent by the right person and the message has not 
been tinkered with before they received it.
  That happens to be something in this new technology, this information 
age, that we will be talking a lot about. But as I sat on the airplane, 
I met a young couple, and I opened the newspaper to the situation with 
the FBI files at the White House, of which the young woman said, ``That 
doesn't make a lot of difference to me,'' because she was a supporter 
of this President and she was going to vote that way anyway. I did 
not argue with her. She did not know me from Adam, but I asked what she 
did for a living and she said she was a computer analyst.

  I said, ``Well, does your company do business with the Government?''
  She said, ``Yes, we do.''
  I said, ``In sensitive areas like defense or security, or whatever?''
  And she said, ``Well, I don't know about those things.''

[[Page S7508]]

  I said, ``Well, would it make any difference if your records were at 
the White House?''
  All at once, it started to become a thing of conversation. I did not 
say anything more about it, but she and her husband talked about it for 
the rest of the trip.
  When we talk about this issue of encryption and key escrow and those 
kinds of new terms that will filter into the conversations of America, 
we have to talk about trust. That is key--trust.
  We look at the situation as it is with our young people today and we 
say, ``Well, maybe midnight basketball didn't work.'' We know that 
juvenile crime is on the upswing again. It is up 11 percent. Juvenile 
murders are up 8 percent. Juvenile robberies are up 16 percent. 
Marijuana use is up 200 percent. That tells me that our young people 
are in a sense of hopelessness; that we leaders have not talked enough 
about trust and we have not talked enough about hope and what this 
great country offers. We only hear that there will not be money for 
education. They are scared they will not be able to go to school after 
all the rhetoric that we hear.
  We ought to be talking the other way around. It is what we talk about 
and how we put it. We should talk about hope and opportunity. Only this 
country offers all kinds of opportunities for young people in today's 
age. And they yearn for discipline. They want to talk about hope and 
what is out there, and this new world of technology offers that.
  So when we think about encryption, we think about the new 
technologies, we hear those new words that are going into the 
conversations, but there is one old standard standby. It is who do we 
trust and how do we tell our young people today, how do we tell them 
that there is hope and their opportunities are greater than of any 
generation, because electronically they open the doors of opportunity 
around the world and it can be done in 5 seconds. It is trust.
  We who are put in positions to represent a constituency teach our 
young every day. Some days we even use words. Some days we use words, 
and that is what I think this is about when we start talking about this 
issue and the issue of what goes on on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
  The keyword is an old standby word called trust.

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