Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein delivered a speech on Tuesday about what he calls “responsible encryption” today. It misses the mark, by far.
Rosenstein starts with a fallacy, attempting to convince you that encryption is unprecedented:
Our
society has never had a system where evidence of criminal wrongdoing
was totally impervious to detection, especially when officers obtain a
court-authorized warrant. But that is the world that technology
companies are creating.
In fact, we’ve
always had (and will always have) a perfectly reliable system whereby
criminals can hide their communications with strong security: in-person
conversations. Moreover, Rosenstein’s history lesson forgets that, for
about 70 years, there was an unpickable lock. In the 1770s, engineer
Joseph Bramah created a lock that remained unpickable until 1851.
Installed in a safe, the owner could ensure that no one could get
inside, or at least not without destroying the contents in the process.
Billions
of instant messages are sent and received each day using mainstream
apps employing default end-to-end encryption. The app creators do
something that the law does not allow telephone carriers to do: they
exempt themselves from complying with court orders.
Here,
Rosenstein ignores the fact that Congress exempted those app
creators-“electronic messaging services”- from the Computer Assistance
for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA).
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