> Brief: Separating the Fact from Fiction
>
> Attorney General Barr is Wrong About Encryption
>
> By: Andi Wilson Thompson
>
> [snip]
> Attorney General William Barr's recent remarks on encryption at the
> International Conference on Cyber Security were full of misleading
> statements and misguided reasoning.
>
> 1 Strong digital encryption is the bedrock infrastructure that
> allows everyday people, businesses, and our government to trust
> technology for critical needs. Barr's demand that tech companies
> give law enforcement special access to encrypted devices would
> seriously violate that trust, compromising the security of
> potentially billions of people by creating a vulnerability that
> criminals and terrorists could easily exploit.
Is there anything new here? The two sides have been making essentially the same arguments for decades (remember the "Clipper Chip"?). The decentralized nature of TCP/IP and the Internet means that in open societies like ours, you can't force the bad guys to use the technology that provides backdoors.
To borrow a maxim, "if it's a crime to use strong encryption, only criminals will use strong encryption."