Top Internet companies say there is no technical way for them to protect their users’ legitimate privacy with encryption while also enabling intelligence agents and law enforcement to gain access to what terrorists plot online… Even when the devices are lawfully seized through court orders, intelligence and law-enforcement agencies are unable to retrieve data from them… Last year, Apple announced that its iPhone operating system would encrypt data by default… “it’s not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants.” Google now has similar encryption for Android devices, as does Facebook for its WhatsApp app…
Source: Why Terrorists Love Silicon Valley. By L. Gordon Crovitz. Wall Street Journal.
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See also an “Opinion” column in WaPost: Why the fear over ubiquitous data encryption is overblown. By Mike McConnell, Michael Chertoff and William Lynn
First, such an encryption system would protect individual privacy and business information from exploitation at a much higher level than exists today. As a recent MIT paper explains, requiring duplicate keys introduces vulnerabilities in encryption that raise the risk of compromise and theft by bad actors. If third-party key holders have less than perfect security, they may be hacked and the duplicate key exposed. This is no theoretical possibility, as evidenced by major cyberintrusions into supposedly secure government databases…
Second, a requirement that U.S. technology providers create a duplicate key will not prevent malicious actors from finding other technology providers who will furnish ubiquitous encryption. The smart bad guys will find ways and technologies to avoid access, and we can be sure that the “dark Web” marketplace will offer myriad such capabilities. This could lead to a perverse outcome in which law-abiding organizations and individuals lack protected communications but malicious actors have them.
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SilValVNews : In other words “a requirement that U.S. technology providers create a duplicate key” will finally lead to an attempt to create a cyberspace version of so called “Gun Free zone“:
