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Riana Pfefferkorn, a Cryptography Fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, has published a whitepaper on the risks of so-called "responsible encryption". This refers to inclusion of a mechanism for exceptional access by law enforcement to the cleartext content of encrypted messages. It also goes by the names "back door", "key escrow", and "golden key".
Federal law enforcement officials in the United States have recently renewed their periodic demands for legislation to regulate encryption. While they offer few technical specifics, their general proposal—that vendors must retain the ability to decrypt for law enforcement the devices they manufacture or communications their services transmit—presents intractable problems that would-be regulators must not ignore.
However, with all that said, a lot more is said than done. Some others would make the case that active participation is needed in the democratic process by people knowledgeable in use of actual ICT. As RMS has many times pointed out much to the chagrin of more than a few geeks, "geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone." Again, participation is needed rather than ceding the whole process, and thus its outcome, to the loonies.
Source : New Paper on The Risks of "Responsible Encryption"
Related:
EFF : New National Academy of Sciences Report on Encryption Asks the Wrong Questions
Great, Now There's "Responsible Encryption"
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Monday February 19 2018, @04:22AM
An excellent point.
Given that the complexity (I discuss that a little bit below) in obfuscating the participants in a particular communication in the current environment, especially for folks who are unlikely to be targeted, I submit that a strategy of strongly encrypting *all* communications, whether they communicate sensitive information or not, is more achievable on a large scale. Sadly, that's not very likely, given the state of the software ecosystem enabling such communications.
I imagine I could undertake a survey of Craigslist ads, posts on sites like 4chan, reddit and, a raft of other sites that allow anonymous comments in an attempt to identify covert (or potentially not so covert) communications channels with a reasonable chance of success.
Even without performing such a survey, I'm certain that such communications, while perhaps not common, are used in the same way that classified ads in newspapers were used for covert communications in previous decades.
In fact, I assume that intelligence gathering agencies already scan all those sites and more in an attempt to identify such communications.
In some cases, that would be *more* secure than using encrypted emails/chat/messaging apps, given the risks associated with local system/app/server related compromises.
However, those covert channels have their own set of issues WRT cipher distribution, mis-identification of messages and timing, among other things.
Unless and until we have protocols and tools that can, relatively seamlessly, ensure confidentiality and integrity, one can either keep sensitive information to oneself, or meet trusted parties in isolated, soundproofed faraday cages to discuss such things.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr