– Crypto Wars 2.0 –
Observers who follow privacy and encryption say they have seen this debate before.
In the mid-1990s, as the Internet was gaining traction, the government pressed for access to digital “keys” to any encryption software or hardware, before abandoning what ended up being a futile effort.
“This is Crypto Wars 2.0,” says Joseph Hall of the Centre for Democracy and Technology, a digital rights group active in both campaigns.
Today, “the main difference is that phones are increasingly deeply personal, containing much more daily life and interaction than a desktop from the 1990s” Hall said.
Hall argued that giving law enforcement access requires companies to “engineer vulnerabilities” which could be exploited by hackers or others.
“There’s no way to tell the difference between a good guy and bad guy when they walk through the back door,” he said.
Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation says the FBI has been making these arguments since 1995, with the same flawed logic.
“We’ve seen this movie before,” Cohn said.
“Regulating and controlling consumer use of encryption was a monstrous proposal officially declared in 2001,” she said in a blog post.
“But like a zombie, it’s now rising from the grave, bringing the same disastrous flaws with it.”
In 2013, before the revelations of massive surveillance from leaked National Security Agency documents, the FBI called for broader authority to capture mobile communications which fall outside traditional surveillance, such as Skype and Google Hangouts.
But civil liberties activities say leaked NSA documents suggest that contrary to FBI claims made last year, the government has many tools at its disposal.
“There are an increasing number of places where we leave our digital trails,” Hall said, including in the Internet cloud, where it can be accessed with a court order.
