Tag Archives: Richard Burr

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How to Kill America’s Tech Economy in One Lesson

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US Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) are at it again. They’ve released a “discussion draft” of  their “bill to require the provision of data in an intelligible format pursuant to a court order. … if such data has been made unintelligible by a feature, product, or service owned, controlled, created, or provided, by the covered entity or by a third party on behalf of the covered entity.”

In plain English: American tech companies would be legally required to only build encryption technology into their products that they could break pursuant to government demands.

There’s been plenty of ink spilled on why this bill is a terrible idea from a privacy standpoint. To put it succinctly, if a type of encryption can be broken, there’s no way to limit to WHO can break it or for what purposes. So even if you trust the US government — and you shouldn’t — the requirements of this bill would also leave you vulnerable to foreign governments, identity thieves and other financially driven cyber-criminals.

Except that no, it really wouldn’t. The strong crypto genie has been out of the bottle for a couple of decades now. Anyone who really wants encryption can get it now and will still be able to get it if the Burr/Feinstein abomination becomes law. That includes “the bad guys” (terrorists and criminals) and it includes you. The only people affected by this law to a level greater than minor inconvenience will be those who just don’t bother.

Except that no, we’ll all be affected, because this bill is custom-made to destroy the US tech industry … and if Silicon Valley sneezes we’re all going to catch a cold.

Yes, America is the prime combination of large and wealthy as a consumer technology market. There are 320 million of us and we’re all rich by comparison to, say, the average resident of Benin City or Budapest or Beijing.

But the seven billion people in those other places do buy computers and smart phones and software. If this bill passes they will continue to buy computers and smart phones and software. They’ll just buy those things from companies that aren’t headquartered in the US or bound by the ignorance and arrogance of the likes of Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein. Why? Because they don’t want Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein reading their mail.

If you’re surprised that Burr and Feinstein would willingly tank the US economy, sending millions of jobs and billions of dollars offshore just to aggrandize their desire for power, you shouldn’t be. That’s what politicians do. Nothing’s more important to a politician than believing he or she is in control. Even if that belief is, as in this case, false.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

Canute’s Courtiers Condemn Consumer Crypto

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In 1818, Jeremiah Chubb collected a reward of £100 (a fairly princely sum back then — depending on how the inflation is calculated, perhaps upward of half a million US dollars today) from the British government. After a major dockyard burglary, the government ran a competition to produce a lock which could only be opened with its own key. Chubb’s “detector lock” took the prize.

Were they alive today, Chubb and his brother Charles (they also invented the modern safe) might find themselves doing quite well in a similar business: Encrypting data to keep it away from prying eyes. But instead of reaping rich rewards from the US government for that kind of work, they’d likely have US Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Richard Burr (R-NC), not to mention FBI director James Comey, calling for their heads.

Comey visited Capitol Hill on December 9, delivering his latest tantrum over encryption to the US Senate’s Judiciary Committee. He wants America’s tech industry to produce the equivalent of pre-picked locks: Encryption that the government can compromise at will with a court order.

At that same hearing, Feinstein announced that she and Burr intend to introduce a bill requiring Silicon Valley to implement Comey’s demand.

Fortunately for all of us, Feinstein, Burr and Comey are a modern trio of King Canute’s courtiers, operating on a false belief that the state can, by decree, halt the tide of progress. The strong encryption genie has been out of the bottle for 20 years, it’s not going back in, and it recognizes no borders. If this law passes, Americans who care about keeping their data private will just use existing encryption applications or get new ones from abroad.

That said, the Feinstein/Burr/Comey proposal is dangerous in at least two ways.

One is that unsophisticated consumers, users who don’t educate and protect themselves and just use handicapped Feinstein/Burr/Comey applications without strong encryption built in, will suffer from the equivalent of broken locks on their data “doors.” Terrorists, drug dealers, child pornographers and regular people who take extra precautions to secure their data won’t be affected. Aunt Sally’s diary and banking information will be.

The second danger is precedent. You wouldn’t remove the deadbolt on your front door, just in case these tyrants wanted to wander into  your house and check your bedroom closet for dead bodies whenever they felt like it, would you? This is the same principle. If we give them an inch they will undoubtedly ignore all stop signs as they take mile after mile, forever (or at least until they run out of gas).

Your privacy and your information are either yours or theirs. There’s no in-between. And there is no room for compromise.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY