Two bills recently passed in the states of New York and California that aim to weaken smartphone security in order to combat crime. The laws would prevent the sale of smartphones with full-disk encryption that could not be unlocked by the manufacturer (at the request of law enforcement). In response, Rep. Ted Lieu of California, a Democrat, and Rep. Blake Farenthold of Texas, a Republican, have proposed a bill, the Ensuring National Constitutional Rights for Your Private Telecommunications (ENCRYPT) Act of 2016, that would block state-level attempts to ban encryption on smartphones sold in the US.

The bipartisan bill addresses multiple issues. One is the potential danger to citizens that backdoors raise. Lieu, who according to Ars Technica is one of four House members with a computer science degree, asserts that there is no way for good guys to have a means of secret way to decrypt devices without bad guys getting access to that same method.

Two, encryption is an interstate issue, bill supporters argue, and having a patchwork of laws that vary by state would not improve matters for law enforcement or strengthen national security.

Requiring companies to weaken devices with ‘backdoors’ means we open up innocent Americans to the bad actors who would love easier access to our citizens’ personal information. Given this reality, a patchwork of state laws on encryption will not make us safer. Rather, they open us up to attacks, and weaken our national security, not strengthen it.”

— Congresswoman Suzan DelBene (D-WA)

Three, a policy enacted in California and New York would not be limited to those two states. This would impact the sale of phones across state lines and leave manufacturers faced with having to produce separate phones for different states (as they already do on an international level) or opt to sell all phones in the US with weakened encryption.

Attitudes toward encryption do not neatly fall along party lines, but many lawmakers lack an understanding of the technical matters at hand. Law enforcement is more focused and views this as a matter of being able to access information that they have been legally authorized by the court to obtain. Uncircumventable encryption gets in the way.

Last year, the International Association of Chiefs of Police release a 57-page report clarifying its view.

The full text of the ENCRYPT Act is available online. To become a law, this bill must first come to a vote in the US House of Representatives and make it through the US Senate before landing on the president's desk.

Photo credit: Andrew Bell

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Via: Ars Technica