Privacy-rights groups argue that the technology could lead to unauthorized eavesdropping, because the keys for unscrambling the code will remain in official hands.

"This is bad for privacy, bad for security and bad for exports," said Jerry Berman, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a Washington nonprofit group that lobbies on privacy issues related to electronic networks. "The Administration is preparing to implement systems that the public will not trust, that foreign countries will not buy and that terrorists will overcome."

Administration officials emphasized they were not trying to dictate standards to industry. They also outlined a plan for safeguarding the electronic "keys" that would be used for unscrambling the Clipper Chip's encoding. The keys will be held jointly by the Treasury Department and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and will be accessible only to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement agencies that receive a court order. Formula Scrambles Signals

The Clipper Chip contains a mathematical formula, or algorithm, that scrambles voice and data signals. Each chip will have a unique serial number and two electronic "keys." Normally, the sender of the message has one key for coding and the recipient the other for decoding. But copies of both keys, which are themselves algorithms, will be stored in separate data bases kept by the Treasury Department and National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Law enforcement agencies trying to eavesdrop on telephone or computer conversations encrypted with the Clipper system will be able to capture the electronic serial number. Upon showing the two Government agencies a court order, the investigators will be given the decoding keys.

A variety of commercially available encryption systems are already in wide use in this country and abroad, although the Government has maintained strict controls on allowing systems made by American companies to be exported. State Department officials said today that they would relax those export restrictions for products containing the Clipper Chip, but would keep them in place for other encryption devices.

Supporters of the Clipper Chip argued that if the Government did nothing, investigators could not penetrate any of the encryption technology available to criminals, terrorists or agents from hostile governments.