![]() The current pandemic has made people more, not less, interested in securing their communications. Where companies could create physical security and privacy measures in an office, such protections become ineffective or impractical to implement at home. 6And as entire sectors of the economy and government work from home due to COVID-19, secure communications are essential. For the public, encryption protects financial and medical data, enables online commerce, protects passwords and online browsing history, and provides privacy from criminals or other unauthorized users. 3Įncryption has increasingly become a mainstay of US communication infrastructure and is used to protect everything from video calls to emails to classified documents. ![]() 221 st-century encryption uses mathematical equations to “scramble data” so that only people with the right mathematical value (i.e., key) can unscramble and understand the information. Leaders of the American Revolution did not just use invisible ink to hide their messages they relied on ciphers-or codes-to protect their communications. Similarly, encryption of data at rest protects communications that are stored on a device by securing a device's operating system, apps, or files by making it unintelligible to anyone who does not have the key to unscramble it.Īmericans have reaped the benefits of encryption for centuries, and it currently provides them privacy from prying eyes, while protecting information pertinent to US national security. This is often referred to as end-to-end encryption or E2EE. If another party, such as the service provider or app developer, tries to read the information while it is in transit it will appear as a random collection of letters and numbers. Two forms of encryption generally exist that protect two types of data: “data in motion” and “data at rest.” 1Encryption protecting data in motion (e.g., sending text messages) is a method of encoding information to ensure that only the sender and the recipient of a piece of information can view and read the information. Law enforcement and the private sector can and should cooperate in addressing crimes on the internet and can do so without undermining a protection as fundamental as encryption. ![]() This does not mean that the internet should be a lawless zone. Encouraging other countries to require tech and internet companies to provide equivalent access to communications within their boundaries.Creating a vulnerability in encrypted communications that could be accessed by foreign adversaries.Weakening protections for the information that the national security community relies upon, especially as it flows over foreign networks.In short, requiring exceptional access to encrypted technologies would undermine national security by: In this paper, we assess the national security risks to a requirement to provide that master key (referred to throughout as “exceptional” or “backdoor” access) to encrypted communications and propose alternative approaches to address online harms. Unlike telephonic communications, and despite repeated requests by law enforcement to do so, Congress has not required internet communications platforms to give law enforcement access to intercept user communications or access stored communications. As more and more of our communications move online, users seek out encrypted services to protect their privacy. While this may seem like a tempting idea, it would have grave implications for our national security. For years, law enforcement officials have warned that, because of encryption, criminals can hide their communications and acts, causing law enforcement to struggle to decrypt data during their investigation-a challenge commonly referred to as “going dark.” They called on technology companies to build a process, like a “master key,” to enable law enforcement to unlock encrypted communications.
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