Federal Government Information Technology

The Arguments for Weakening Encryption Aren't Any Better Under Trump

NextGov: U.S. Attorney General William Barr gave a talk on Tuesday at Fordham University, on “going dark” and the purported need to outlaw encryption systems that lack backdoors for law-enforcement officials. This was hardly the first time that a Department of Justice official has tried to persuade Americans to accept holes in encryption. What was surprising is that backdoors were the only topic that Barr spoke on: it seems that the Trump administration has become very serious about this issue.

The attorney general’s talk follows a recent line of reasoning that asserts that the Fourth Amendment actually requires that communication providers incorporate encryption backdoors. I’m no lawyer, so I won’t comment on the validity of this theory, except that it seems a remarkable leap to me.

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