Officials meet to discuss offensive against encryption

Jun 30, 2019 05:51 GMT  ·  By

After banning and unbanning Huawei, United States President Donald Trump is now planning to go after end-to-end encryption, with a new report claiming that senior White House officials met this week to discuss the first step the administration could make in this regard.

Politico notes, citing three people familiar with the matter, that number two officials from several key agencies discussed a potential offensive against end-to-end encryption.

“The two paths were to either put out a statement or a general position on encryption, and [say] that they would continue to work on a solution, or to ask Congress for legislation,” one source was quoted as saying by the cited publication.

While the White House administration wants to kill off end-to-end encryption in software developed by American companies, this proposal was received with mixed reactions from representatives of various agencies in the country.

For example, the DHS “is internally divided,” Politico notes, as the agency is aware of the security implications that banning end-to-end encryption could generate.

The encryption dispute

Pushing for regulations against end-to-end encryption is described as a decisive step in the efforts of intelligence agencies and law enforcement in the United States to access devices and data belonging to criminals and terrorists.

The encryption, which the majority of American companies have already bundled into their products, including here Apple and Google, blocks investigators from accessing suspects’ data. Tech companies position end-to-end encryption as a key privacy feature, and several of them have warned that any regulation against it could even affect national security.

Apple, in particular, is one of the biggest companies fighting against anti-encryption regulation. The company refused to unlock an iPhone used by the San Bernardino terrorist, explaining that breaking into the device would have compromised the security of all customers.

The FBI eventually unlocked the device using software developed by a third-party.