U.S. Attorney General William Barr suggested that Americans should just accept encryption backdoor security risks (via TechCrunch).
Encryption Backdoor Risks
In a speech today, William Barr called on tech companies to help the federal government to access devices with a lawful order. In other words, ignore the security risks and put a backdoor into their encryption. Although this is highly insecure and makes the encryption worthless, Mr. Barr says you should just deal with it.
The risk, he said, was acceptable because “we are talking about consumer products and services such as messaging, smart phones, e-mail, and voice and data applications,” and “not talking about protecting the nation’s nuclear launch codes.”
The attorney general said it was “untenable” that devices offer uncrackable encryption while offering zero access to law enforcement.
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) disagreed, calling Mr. Barr’s remarks “outrageous, wrongheaded and dangerous.”
If we give this attorney general and this president the unprecedented power to break encryption across the board burrow into the most intimate details of every American’s life – they will abuse those powers.
Further Reading:
[It’s Official: Australia Bans Encryption]
[Germany Considering Law Banning End-to-End Encryption in Chat Apps]
He’s an idiot like his predecessors. This ignores that encryption has been open sourced to death.
Criminals will just use and compile their own solutions and NOTHING can be done to stop that. But average citizens will have given up their security for no good reason. Of course this is the VERY SAME reasoning (sound) used by the right over 2nd amendment. But you know, screw it.
Hypocrisy, because politicians.
There are often people who say, “so what? I’m not doing anything wrong. Let them sift my data.”
That may be true, but they assume there’s no such thing as human error, or even computer error for that matter.