Encryption

How the Senate Encryption Bill Resembles Chinese Law (And How it Does Not)

The Senate Intelligence Committee unveiled legislation this week that would require technology companies to give up your encrypted iPhone messages to law enforcement. The bill shares a bit with similar legislation China adopted last year.

The Senate’s Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016 wants to make technology companies like Apple comply with court orders and give “intelligible information or data, or appropriate technical assistance to obtain such information or data,” to law enforcement. In other words, the bill says that communications companies no longer could provide end-to-end encryption to consumers that the providers can’t break (even under court order.) That means that they can’t offer actual end-to-end encryption.

So far, the bill has earned predictable condemnation from the technology community, whose reaction has run the spectrum from mockery to alarm. Kevin Bankston, who directs New America’s Open Technology Institute, described it to Wired as “easily the most ludicrous, dangerous, technically illiterate” proposal he had seen in 20 years. Reuters reports that the White House is hesitant.