Here We Go Again: Trump Administration Considers Outlawing Encryption

from the not-this-bullshit-again dept

Well, here we go again. According to Politico, on Wednesday, at Trump's National Security Council meeting, a proposal was floated that the administration should back legislation that would outlaw encryption. Of course, that's not how it'll be framed should they actually decide to go down this path. Instead, they'll be nonsense about "responsible encryption" and "lawful access." But, make no mistake, what's being proposed is outlawing encryption.

Senior officials debated whether to ask Congress to effectively outlaw end-to-end encryption, which scrambles data so that only its sender and recipient can read it, these people told POLITICO. Tech companies like Apple, Google and Facebook have increasingly built end-to-end encryption into their products and software in recent years — billing it as a privacy and security feature but frustrating authorities investigating terrorism, drug trafficking and child pornography. “The two paths were to either put out a statement or a general position on encryption, and [say] that they would continue to work on a solution, or to ask Congress for legislation,” said one of the people.

It's unclear what the final decision was, but if it was to back such a law, we'll know about it soon enough. There are some sensible folks on this issue -- including some from the intelligence communities who actually understand the security value of encryption. The State Department and Commerce Departments are both also said to support keeping encryption legal. It's mostly the law enforcement folks who are against encryption: including parts of the DOJ and FBI, ICE and the Secret Service. As if any of those need any more power. Homeland Security (of which ICE is a part) is apparently "internally divided."

It's been said before, but this is not a debate. There is no debate. There is no "on the one hand, on the other hand." There is no "privacy v. security." This is "no privacy and weakened security v. actual privacy and actual security." There's literally no debate to be had here. If you understand the issues, encryption is essential, and any effort to take away end-to-end encryption is outlawing technology that keeps everyone safe. While Senators Feinstein and Burr released a truly dangerous bill a few years back to outlaw encryption, who knows what sort of nonsense would come out of this and whether or not it could actually get enough support in Congress. Hopefully not.

But just the fact that security folks now need to waste a ton of time and energy on this shit all over again is immensely frustrating and wasteful. This debate was over decades ago. There is no reason to do it again.

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Filed Under: backdoors, doj, donald trump, encryption, end to end encryption, fbi, going dark, national security council