Several years from now I'm going to write a book looking back on the 104th Congress and the Clinton Administration.

By then, with any luck, all the questions about how our national information infrastructure will function will -- for good or ill -- be answered. All the lawsuits over the Communications Decency Act will be over, all the intellectual property and copyright issues will be settled, and the Federal Government will have made all its decisions on data encryption policy.

My book will argue that during the years of 1995 and 1996, while the entire world discovered a whole new way of communicating, sharing information resources and doing business over the Internet, our leaders acted like a bunch of bumbling, clueless idiots when it came to trying to regulate the unregulatable.

Though it was the legal wrangle over the CDA that grabbed the headlines and wound up before the Supreme Court, I will write, it was the battle over federal encryption policy that would have the most long-term effects on communications law into the 21st Century.

In case you haven't been following the issue very closely, encryption is the act of protecting your electronic communications in such a way that they cannot be read by anyone other than their intended recipient. And because encryption can also be used to protect electronic business transactions over the Internet, it is crucial to making it safe for online commerce.

To encrypt an e-mail message, you'll a program like Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), which will make the message look like scrambled eggs to anyone who should not be reading it.

But the US government has some old and moldy Cold War-era regulations banning the export of any such program. Encryption products are considered munitions, or military hardware, that if they fell into the wrong hands, could become a threat to national security.

In fact, the National Security Agency has put together a classified briefing that reportedly makes anyone who witnesses it paranoid over relaxing US export restrictions.

But the regulations have left U.S. software firms standing still while firms in all over the world get their heads full of steam developing their own products.

That would have changed had a bill sponsored by Montana Senator Conrad Burns made it through.

Burns is the primary sponsor of the so-called Pro-Code Bill, which would allow the export of strong public domain encryption programs, and require the White House to allow such export if similar products are already available overseas.

Early last month, the bill had cleared its final hurdles before the Senate Commerce Committee and was ready for a floor vote. Realizing the bill had a chance of passing, Vice President Al Gore's office apparently twisted the arm of Sen. James Exon (D-Neb.), who is retiring after this year, to write a letter to committee chairman Sen. Larry Pressler (R- S.D.) citing unspecified national security concerns, basically killing the bill.

Exon, you may remember, was one of the primary movers behind the Communications Decency Act. To Exon, new technology includes pocket calculators.

Burns decided to save the Pro-Code bill for the 105th Congress, in hopes that it will fare better.

Meanwhile, the White House has been desperately trying to push through legislation that would bar any decision by the Commerce Department to restrict the export of an encryption product from being challenged in court. There are at the moment, three such cases working their way through the court system.

Encryption is probably the most important issue facing the growth of the Internet as a global medium, and it's important that voters get up to speed on it. There are several resources explaining the issues on the Web at www.eff.org and at www.cdt.org.

We can't stand for elected officials who don't know web page from an e-mail address. We have to demand they know what they're talking about when they try to make laws concerning this new medium. And to do that, we have to know what we're talking about too.