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Like other politicians and government officials, President Trump's nominee for the position of Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, wants to have it both ways when it comes to encryption:
At his confirmation hearing, Sessions was largely non-committal. But in his written responses to questions posed by Sen. Patrick Leahy, however, he took a much clearer position:
Question: Do you agree with NSA Director Rogers, Secretary of Defense Carter, and other national security experts that strong encryption helps protect this country from cyberattack and is beneficial to the American people's' digital security?
Response: Encryption serves many valuable and important purposes. It is also critical, however, that national security and criminal investigators be able to overcome encryption, under lawful authority, when necessary to the furtherance of national-security and criminal investigations.
Despite Sessions' "on the one hand, on the other" phrasing, this answer is a clear endorsement of backdooring the security we all rely on. It's simply not feasible for encryption to serve what Sessions concedes are its "many valuable and important purposes" and still be "overcome" when the government wants access to plaintext. As we saw last year with Sens. Burr and Feinstein's draft Compliance with Court Orders Act, the only way to give the government this kind of access is to break the Internet and outlaw industry best practices, and even then it would only reach the minority of encryption products made in the USA.
Related: Presidential Candidates' Tech Stances: Not Great
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Wednesday January 25 2017, @04:29PM
I hope you are right that this can be done, that this can be effectively communicated, and that people are willing to try to understand.
There is a reason that many tech companies are made up of individuals that are not on the fringes of the political spectrum. A lot of that has to do with the view of what change is and what it represents.
Certainly, change is a constant. It would seem that some people will go to great lengths to avoid change, though, and willful ignorance (I am not saying stupidity--I am saying the refusal to accept something and carrying on as normal) is an unfortunate response by people that don't have a good alternative to the change.
Often it makes things worse, like policies that are not in the best interests of those resisting change, made more easily implemented because of a refusal to understand the issues and a desire for nothing to happen. The problem is that changes are more easily introduced and implemented when the populace is ignorant--willful or otherwise.
IT is an excellent arena where we can safely conclude that the populace is ignorant of the difficulties and concerns surrounding many concepts within it-- privacy, security -- and the merger of both, encryption-- but we can also conclude that the populace knows how to respond to fear. Consider one-issue voters. They are often compelled to vote out of fear that their one issue will no longer be decided in their favor.
It is easier to tap into an emotion than it is to relate to an "expert", even worse when they are described as egghead geeks that are so far removed that they don't understand the 'realities'.
I am hoping for the best, but expect that Big Brother Inside (the clipper chip, if you recall--something President Clinton proposed back during his presidency) will see its modern equivalent make a resurgence. This may result in a mandate... and the support will be drummed up because of various threats described that have only one solution to maintain your safety--complete surrender of privacy in the digital realm in the name of security, because terrorist pedophiles want to take your rights while praying in a different religion as they compete for outsourcing contracts to replace your jobs.