The only thing more dangerous than a member of Congress who knows what they are doing is a member of Congress who has no clue what they are doing.
The Senate Intelligence Committee released the draft of a bill on encryption this week to howls from the tech community, as can be expected these days whenever the government tries to weigh in on encryption. Co-sponsors Richard Burr of North Carolina (above, right) and Dianne Feinstein of California (above, left, and who should know better, given her constituency) want to compel tech companies "to provide 'technical assistance' to government investigators seeking locked data,"
as reported by The Hill.
There are an amazing number of people in government circles who, out of either confusion or willful ignorance of how technology works, continue to think it's possible to believe that U.S. citizens have a right to strong encryption to protect themselves from cybercrime while believing that law enforcement should have the right to break that encryption as needed. This notion of a "magical key" that could supposedly unlock encrypted technology products only under certain circumstances causes eyes to roll across the tech industry every time that phrase is uttered.
You only need to look at two other recent developments reported by Motherboard to understand why. First, the FBI
quietly revealed earlier this month that a group of hackers has had access to its servers and networks since at least 2011, and have "stolen sensitive information from various government and commercial networks." Then
we learned that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police has had "a single, global encryption key" to consumer BlackBerry handsets that it could use at will to monitor messages sent from those phones (businesses that use BlackBerry's enterprise software create their own encryption keys that the company -- and, presumably, the RCMP -- can't access).
If a government orders tech companies to create ways for law enforcement to access their products, those methods will be discovered and used by others for criminal purposes: it's just a matter of time. Fortunately or unfortunately for BlackBerry, there is little commercial incentive to hack into its handsets at this point, given how consumers have deserted them by the millions (even in Canada). But swap the RCMP for the FBI (which just admitted that its systems have been unsecure), and BlackBerry for Apple, and suddenly things change.
Burr and Feinstein want to freeze the development of encryption technology right as cybercrime becomes extremely lucrative: for all the frenzy around smartphones, only 68 percent of U.S. adults had one in late 2015 while 92 percent had some form of mobile phone,
according to Pew Research Center. That number is going to grow, and the commercial incentives to hack those phones will grow alongside. And for all their concerns about terrorism,
Fast Company notes that if the U.S. enacts such a bill, tech-savvy terrorists (which is quite a few of them these days) will simply use technology created outside the U.S. that isn't subject to those laws.
This bill has little chance of passing. But at some point, the aging generation of Congresspeople that make our laws need to truly understand how the technology works, or at least hire a group of advisers that can prevent them from doing more harm than good.
