On Lawfare, Susan Landau finds herself advocating for securing communications now that Donald Trump is the President-elect, and to objections that this will cripple national security, she has an answer:
Protecting the privacy of speech is crucial for preserving our democracy. We live at a time when tracking an individual—a journalist, a member of the political opposition, a citizen engaged in peaceful protest—or listening to their communications is far easier than at any time in human history. Political leaders on both sides now have a responsibility to work for securing communications and devices. This means supporting not only the laws protecting free speech and the accompanying communications, but also the technologies to do so: end-to-end encryption and secured devices; it also means soundly rejecting all proposals for front-door exceptional access. Prior to the election there were strong, sound security arguments for rejecting such proposals. The privacy arguments have now, suddenly, become critically important as well. Threatened authoritarianism means that we need technological protections for our private communications every bit as much as we need the legal ones we presently have.
Enabling encryption without exceptional access will not prevent law enforcement from doing its job. When the world went encrypted twenty years ago, the NSA claimed it was “going deaf.” But then the agency found other ways to collect intelligence (“NSA has better SIGINT than at any time in history,” according to its former director Mike McConnell). As many have observed, law enforcement will be able to find other ways to conduct investigations even without exceptional access.
Protecting our ability to communicate in private is vital. Congress must respond accordingly. Anything less threatens the very foundations of our republic.
Reminiscent of the libertarians claim that we’ll always find a way to get something done while lowering the cost, if only given the freedom to try. But it does become another piece of technology subject to failure and subversion, without the least little peep – at least for the non-specialist. It’ll be up to the specialists to make secure communications work with little or no notice by the users.
