The Washington Post has an interesting take on the on-going encryption wars. Daniel Weitzner, a former White House deputy chief technology officer for Internet policy, has an op-ed in which he lays out the usual arguments against backdoors in encryption applications. The interesting part, though, is that he says that even if it were possible to safely add such backdoors, it wouldn’t solve the problem.
The problem, he says, is that the government has lost the trust of its citizens. Through abuse and overreach they have forfeited any reasonable expectation that the government can
- be trusted to conduct surveillance in a nonintrusive way, restricting their activities to matters of national security
- safely manage the keys to the hypothetical backdoor
Their failure, so far, on both of these items are manifest and obvious to anyone bothering to look. What reason do we have to expect that things would improve if crypto-Tinker Bell suddenly delivered the government’s yearned for backdoor?
As things stand now, not much reason on either of the two items. Weitzner says that to address item 1, the government much embrace transparency and oversight. Even if that were to happen, it still leaves the second problem. Can we trust the government to safeguard the exceptional access they are asking for? The seemingly never ending stream of embarrassing breakins to government systems doesn’t give us much reason for confidence.
The answer remains what it has been. We must resist every government effort to bull their way into our private affairs. If they think a crime has been committed let them get a warrant and demand the user unlock the communication. Anything else is just an open season fishing license.