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Rep. Anna Eshoo and Sen. Ron Wyden have written a thoughtful letter calling on law enforcement to employ currently available digital investigative capabilities.
The Department of Justice wants access to encrypted consumer devices but promises not to infiltrate business products or affect critical infrastructure. Yet that's not possible, because there is no longer any difference between those categories of devices. Consumer devices are critical infrastructure. They affect national security. And it would be foolish to weaken them, even at the request of law enforcement.
In Commonwealth v. Jones, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court held, for the second time in five years, that the government may compel a defendant to unlock an electronic device under certain circumstances.
The most recent purportedly serious proposal by a Western government to force technology companies to provide access to the content of encrypted communications comes from Ian Levy and Crispin Robinson of the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, the U.K.’s equivalent of the National Security Agency.
The so-called Crypto Wars have been going on for 25 years now.
Lawfare has run a series of posts concerning exceptional access.
This is part of a series of essays from the Crypto 2018 Workshop on Encryption and Surveillance.
This is part of a series of essays from the Crypto 2018 Workshop on Encryption and Surveillance.
In August 2018, the leading international academic conference on cryptography hosted a Workshop on Encryption and Surveillance. The workshop explored both legal and technical aspects of the ongoing debate over the impact of strong encryption and law enforcement surveillance capabilities. The workshop was co-chaired by Tim Edgar (Brown University), Joan Feigenbaum (Yale University), and me. As we described it at the time:
This is part of a series of essays from the Crypto 2018 Workshop on Encryption and Surveillance.
In any discussion of cyber security, details matter.