The following Congressional testimony was submitted from http://www.vtw.org/submit/.

Business name:Webster University
Street:470 E. Lockwood Ave.
City:St. Louis
State:MO
Zip code:63119
Contact name:Bruce Umbaugh
Contact title:Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Contact email address:bumbaugh@webster2.websteruniv.edu
Phone number:(314)961-2660 x7826
Fax number:(314) 968-7173
Business WWW URL:http://www.websteruniv.edu/philosophy/index.html
Description of business:

Webster University was founded in 1915. It became a non-sectarian, private college in the 1960's, opened its first international campus in the 1980's, and anticipates opening its Shanghai campus in the 1990's. Webster enrolls more than 10,000 students worldwide.
Written testimony:

I am a philosophy professor at Webster University. Besides my research and teaching that relates to cyberspace and computer ethics, I am also involved in more traditional areas of philosophy, including epistemology, philosophy of science, and critical thinking. Webster University's main campus is in St. Louis, but we also offer undergraduate degree programs at our campuses in San Diego, Kansas City, and Orlando, in the United States, and in Geneva, Switzerland, Leiden, The Netherlands, London, England, and Vienna, Austria. Graduate instruction is available at those campuses plus some fifty or so others in the U.S. and Bermuda. We hope to have approval to begin operations in Shanghai, Peoples Republic of China, in the near future. My concerns about the regulation of cryptography arise both as the concerns an ordinary citizen who values privacy and freedom of expression, but also out of professional worries related to my role as a teacher.

Among my pedagogical interests I count applications of computer-mediated communication. Next year, I will teach an "internationalized" section of Introduction to Critical Thinking entirely via the Net, enrolling students from all of Webster's undergraduate campuses in the United States and Europe (and, perhaps China by that time, as well). This effort is funded in part by a Title VI grant from the United States Department of Education. As you can imagine, a variety of barriers must be addressed for a Net-based course to succeed. In the case of this internationalized course, restrictions on cryptography pose a special difficulty.

When I meet students face-to-face in a classroom, they have some real assurance that the work they hand in will be the work I evaluate. That assurance, though rarely recognized in traditional classroom settings, is vital to the educational infrastructure on which we rely. On the Net, by contrast, a variety of garblings are possible, not only by equipment failures, but by the intervention of malicious individuals, as well. As you no doubt recognize, in a philosophy class--as in many others--even a small change in a text can radically alter its meaning. Consequently, we need, ideally, some way to assure that the text I evaluate is the one that a student submitted. One solution would be to distribute cryptographic software with which students might sign their work, using techniques that other testimony has I am sure described. I could then authenticate that the work I grade is the work they submitted. In the current climate, it appears to me that export restrictions preclude that possibility. Similar concerns arise for the administrative functions of the University in this global environment.

Because some of my students reside outside the borders of the United States, we will all be importing and exporting information regularly. The problems that restrictive rules on cryptography pose for my University in global operations must surely be orders of magnitude more for more commercial organizations conducting business on a global scale. Legislation before Congress, including Pro-CODE, would help alleviate these difficulties. I encourage this Congress to act to make the United States more competitive in the global environment by relaxing export restrictions on cryptographic tools and devices, by guaranteeing Americans the right to use strong cryptography without key escrow, and to stop government schemes to promulgate ineffective cryptography. I thank the members of the Committee for their time.

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