The Senate’s Draft Encryption Bill Is ‘Ludicrous, Dangerous, Technically Illiterate’

Andy Greenberg, reporting for Wired:

On Thursday evening, the draft text of a bill called the “Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016,” authored by offices of Senators Diane Feinstein and Richard Burr, was published online by the Hill. It’s a nine-page piece of legislation that would require people to comply with any authorized court order for data — and if that data is “unintelligible,” the legislation would demand that it be rendered “intelligible.” In other words, the bill would make illegal the sort of user-controlled encryption that’s in every modern iPhone, in all billion devices that run Whatsapp’s messaging service, and in dozens of other tech products. “This basically outlaws end-to-end encryption,” says Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “It’s effectively the most anti-crypto bill of all anti-crypto bills.”

Kevin Bankston, the director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, goes even further: “I gotta say in my nearly 20 years of work in tech policy this is easily the most ludicrous, dangerous, technically illiterate proposal I’ve ever seen,” he says.

The good news:

The Burr/Feinstein draft text may in fact be so bad for privacy that it’s good for privacy: Privacy advocates point out that it has almost zero likelihood of making it into law in its current form. The White House has already declined to publicly support the bill. And Adam Schiff, the top Democratic congressman on the House of Representatives’ intelligence committee, gave WIRED a similarly ambivalent comment on the upcoming legislation yesterday.

★ Friday, 8 April 2016