[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 60 (Thursday, April 29, 1999)]
[House]
[Pages H2527-H2528]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         THE HIGH TECH ECONOMY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Washington (Mr. Smith) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, the fastest growing segment of 
our economy has been the high tech segment of our economy driven mostly 
by computers, software, the Internet, biotech, and also the products 
that our increasing technology enables us to create. It is what has 
been most responsible for the strong economy we have enjoyed in the 
last 7 or 8 years and, more importantly, will be the cornerstone of 
what the future is going to hold. The more we can do to move the high 
tech economy forward, the more jobs that we could create and the 
stronger an economy that we can have.
  Now we deal with a lot of complicated issues in Congress. Mostly our 
goal is to try to improve the lives of the people we represent. There 
are a lot of very strong difficulties in doing that, but the one thing 
that most clearly, positively affects the lives of the people all of us 
represent is a strong economy. That is means opportunity, opportunity 
for good jobs and a decent wage so that you can take care of your 
family and build for the future. High tech is critical to that.
  That is the first component of what I want to talk about, the high 
tech economy. The second component is exports and basically creating 
markets for our goods, specifically for our high tech goods. Ninety-six 
percent of the people in the world live someplace other than the United 
States of America.
  Now in the U.S. we still manage to consume 20 percent of the world's 
goods, services and products, so what that means is if we are going to 
have growth in any aspect of our economy really, not just the high tech 
aspect, we are going to have to look overseas. We are going to have to 
look to that other 96 percent of the world out there and increase their 
consumption of our goods.
  Bottom line: Increase exports, and in particular, increase exports of 
high tech products. Those are the two things that need to come 
together, the importance of getting at that 96 percent of the rest of 
the world and the importance of continuing to allow our high tech 
economy to thrive. If that high tech economy is going to thrive, we are 
going to have to get access to those other markets. Our companies in 
this country are going to have to get access to those other markets for 
one central reason, that we are the leaders in most aspects of the high 
tech economy.
  We are far from alone. Countries throughout the world are developing 
their own Internet technology, their own telecommunications technology, 
their own software and hardware technology. We have competitors out 
there, and if they have access to markets that we do not have access 
to, that is inevitably going to catch up with us. It is going to give 
them the ability to grow and prosper and then feed more money back into 
research and development to develop the next best product, and in the 
high tech community, as my colleagues know, today's best product could 
be just totally out the window tomorrow as technology leaps ahead. You 
have to be the one in the position to leap ahead, and to get there we 
have to give our high tech products access to those foreign markets, 
and we are failing in three areas right at the moment.
  Number one, we have too many broad based economic sanctions that are 
unilaterally imposed by our country. We unilaterally decide that our 
country's companies will not be allowed to do business with dozens of 
other countries for dozens of other reasons. This does not work because 
while we make that unilateral decision, our competitors do not. Our 
competitors sell products to those same countries, so we do not have 
any impact on the country that we are trying to impact except to force 
them to buy good goods from our competitors.
  But two other areas are specifically problematic for the high tech 
community. One is encryption software, and skipping a complicated 
analysis, encryption software is basically the software that enables 
you to protect whatever is on your computer, to make sure that only you 
can see it and no one else can. This is very important for a variety of 
reasons, privacy reasons but also competitive reasons.
  Any computer technology, computer product, software product that is 
sold requires top-of-the-line encryption technology, but our country 
does not allow our companies to export top-of-

[[Page H2528]]

the-line encryption technology. We place caps on how much of it can be 
sent out, depending on the product and depending on the service. That 
puts us at a disadvantage with our competitors and gives them a chance 
to get ahead of us in the high tech economy and jeopardizes future 
economic growth.
  We do this because we are concerned about the national security 
implications of encryption technology, and they are there, there is no 
question. The better encryption technology you have, the better you are 
able to either protect your national security or breach somebody 
else's. The mistake we made is in assuming that by placing controls on 
the export of our companies' encryption technology, that somehow stops 
the rest of the world from getting it.
  Encryption technology can be downloaded off the Internet. Dozens of 
other countries sell and export top-of-the-line encryption technology. 
All we do is place ourselves at a disadvantage and in the long run hurt 
our national security interests. We hurt them because we hurt our own 
companies' ability to be the leaders in leap-ahead technology. There 
was a great relationship in this country between the National Security 
Council, the FBI and our high-tech companies. They can work together to 
develop the best products to help with our national security concerns, 
but not if the company developing the best technology is from China or 
Germany or even Canada. They do not have the same cooperative 
relationship with the FBI that our own companies can have. We need to 
change encryption technology export, for the good of our economy and 
for the good of our export sector.

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