Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a frequent critic of government spying, has an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times denouncing the FBI’s push for tech companies to enable easier backdoor access to Americans’ data.

Earlier this year, FBI Director James Comey claimed that encryption is making is too difficult for law enforcement to access information, and appealed to Congress to mandate backdoor access to technology.

“Encryption threatens to lead us all to a very, very dark place,” he said.

Comey proposed that there should be a way to somehow make it easier for the government to break through security measures, without also granting hackers better access to the same data. “I’m not smart enough technically to figure out how that might work,” Comey admitted.

In Wyden’s op-ed, he belittles this plan, writing, “Unfortunately, there are no magic keys that can be used only by good guys for legitimate reasons. There is only strong security or weak security.”

The problem with this logic is that building a back door into every cellphone, tablet, or laptop means deliberately creating weaknesses that hackers and foreign governments can exploit. Mandating back doors also removes the incentive for companies to develop more secure products at the time people need them most; if you're building a wall with a hole in it, how much are you going invest in locks and barbed wire? What these officials are proposing would be bad for personal data security and bad for business and must be opposed by Congress.



Wyden also points to examples of backdoors being exploited in other countries:

Built-in back doors have been tried elsewhere with disastrous results. In 2005, for example, Greece discovered that dozens of its senior government officials' phones had been under surveillance for nearly a year. The eavesdropper was never identified, but the vulnerability was clear: built-in wiretapping features intended to be accessible only to government agencies following a legal process.



Wyden has introduced a bill that would forbid the government from requiring software companies to provide them access to user data, and promises in the op-ed to reintroduce it in the next session.

He also notes that tech companies’ reputation have been badly damaged by the revelations of NSA spying, and that Americans overwhelmingly want better data encryption.

“Most Americans accept that there are times their government needs to rely on clandestine methods of intelligence gathering to protect national security and ensure public safety,” says Wyden, “But they also expect government agencies and officials to operate within the boundaries of the law, and they now know how egregiously intelligence agencies abused their trust.”