Sen. Dianne Feinstein wants to bring back bill that bans strong encryption
FEINSTEIN SEES ENCRYPTION OPENING — As the FBI struggles to unlock the iPhone used by the gunman in the recent Texas massacre, Sen. Dianne Feinstein believes it’s time to bring back long-dormant encryption-piercing legislation. It’s been about 18 months since she and Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr floated legislation that would have required tech firms to hand over customers’ secure messages when served with a warrant. The measure, released after a bitter feud between the FBI and Apple over a locked iPhone, was never formally introduced but the latest case is exactly why it should be revived, she told Martin. “I think we ought to move that bill,” in an interview with Politico.
“No entity or individual is above the law,” Feinstein said last year. “The bill we have drafted would simply provide that, if a court of law issues an order to render technical assistance or provide decrypted data, the company or individual would be required to do so. Today, terrorists and criminals are increasingly using encryption to foil law enforcement efforts, even in the face of a court order. We need strong encryption to protect personal data, but we also need to know when terrorists are plotting to kill Americans.”
Despite most of Silicon Valley rallying behind Apple, in an interview with the Financial Times tech pioneer Bill Gates took a different approach:
“Nobody’s talking about a backdoor, so that’s not the right question. This is a specific case where the government is asking for access to information. They’re not asking for some general thing, they’re asking for a particular case,” Gates said in the interview. He said the government is only looking for “a specific set of information” and not a master key to break into other phones.
“It is no different than [the question of] should anybody ever have been able to tell the phone company to get information, should anybody be able to get at bank records,” he said. “Let’s say the bank had tied a ribbon round the disk drive and said, ‘Don’t make me cut this ribbon because you’ll make me cut it many times.’"
However, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has expressed that “the FBI’s request to enable a backdoor “could compromise users’ privacy.”
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein used the encrypted phone of the Texas shooter, David Kelley, to argue against tech companies encrypting data in a way that law enforcement could not later access.
Apple has said it immediately reached out to the FBI to offer assistance getting information off of Kelley’s cellphone. This was not mentioned in Rosenstein’s speech.
“When you shoot dozens of innocent American citizens, we want law enforcement to investigate your communications and stored data,” he said.
“We expect police and prosecutors to investigate such horrendous crimes. There are things that we need to know.”
Encryption and counter-terrorism experts, including former heads of the National Security Agency (NSA), CIA and Department of Homeland Security, argue that creating such “back doors” is a much greater security risk than hindering investigations.
