Get Ready for Encryption Fireworks

Since the early 1990s, there has been a battle going on between the federal government and privacy advocates. Privacy advocates want strong encryption. The government wants weak encryption that it can break. Except of course for the encryption that they use.

They claim they need it is to hunt down terrorists, but that didn’t get any traction.

Then they claimed it was to hunt down pedophiles.

There are several bills in play right now and none of them really solve the problem. Not even a little bit.

One bill is the earnit act which, in typical Congressional fashion, kicks the can down the road. Since actually figuring out how to solve the problem of bad guys using encryption while at the same time protecting the rest of us, the earnit act proposes to create a commission to make recommendations to the Attorney General, who is not required to accept any of the recommendations and can create his own. Then if the tech community doesn’t accept whatever he says, they will lose the protection they have for content posted by users. Since Congress has like one person who understands tech out of 500, what they don’t seem to realize is that this will not achieve the goal that Republicans have getting more right wing content on the web. Instead what tech companies will have to do is dramatically restrict user posted content to make sure that they do not post any content from either side that would get them sued for helping pedophiles or promoting violence or whatever. Facebook will go back to what Zuckerberg originally planned it for – figuring out which girls he wanted to go out with or something slightly less PG than that. If they lose their immunity, they will restrict content.

If that happens, billions of dollars of investor capital value will go up in flames. I don’t have any Facebook or Twitter stock, but if you do and the bill passes, you should sell.

Sen. Graham introduced a new version of the bill to solve this problem. He wants to let the states decide. That way Twitter will have to comply with 50 state laws. That will definitely make things easier.

The Post says that legislators are far less sympathetic to tech companies and that may be true, but the President seems to like to use at least one tech company and if laws pass that remove protections, those companies are far more likely to censor him than they are now when they have immunity.

There are definitely two camps in Congress right now – those that want to protect people’s privacy and those that want to get rid of privacy because it is inconvenient to them.

Another bill, called the lead act, would literally ban strong encryption and make it a crime to use encryption that doesn’t have a backdoor.

Except, of course, crooks, how do I say this, DON’T CARE MUCH ABOUT THE LAW. So they will use strong encryption except for the dumb ones and we don’t really fix anything.

I am sure if the law requires a back door to private conversations, no crooks will ever discover how it works.

Kind of like how Apple tries to make it impossible to jailbreak their phones.

And their phones are typically jailbroken within 24-48 hours of a new software release.

I am not saying that there is not a problem. What I am saying is that there is no simple solution and rather than passing the buck to a committee or the states, figure out the answer. Even if it takes a couple of years. Figure out the right answer.

I must be thinking of a different organization than Congress. Credit: WaPo

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