A while back I ran across some advocacy for better secure communications for consumers, which reminded me that this makes some law enforcement professionals uncomfortable, since that closes off a source of information. In particular, the suggestion that encrypted communications be the default, rather than an option. So I couldn’t help but laugh when I read this Lawfare article by Susan Landau:
Trump’s lax approach to security presents an unusually stark problem. But unsecured communications have long been a problem for U.S. national security. In 1972, for example, the Soviet Union’s eavesdropping led to the “The Great Grain Robbery”: the eavesdropping of communications on calls between American wheat farmers and the Department of Agriculture that enabled the Russians to covertly buy record wheat at low prices, thus causing a U.S. grain shortage eighteen months later. …
Imagine if instead of the U.S. government fighting the spread of strong cryptography, the NSA and FBI had pushed for cell phones that would always encrypt communications end-to-end. This would make it far harder to intercept communications. It would also mean that every legislator and legislative aide, every chief executive, every financial officer—indeed any person who had information that would be useful to an eavesdropper, whether it be China, Russia, an industrial competitor or a criminal organization—would necessarily use phones that routinely secured their conversations. And importantly, it would protect the president’s phone calls even if he refused to listen to the officials begging him to use a secure method of communication.
While end-to-end encryption would make it much harder for United States to listen in to what the bad guys were saying, such use of end-to-end encryption wouldn’t mean the end of wiretapping. High-value targets would still be the subject of targeted, sophisticated hacks. For high-value targets like the president, this is still a concern.
That weakening our weaponry against criminals and national adversaries would have paradoxically made us more secure in this particular nightmare situation just makes me laugh.
It helps that I’m mildly exhausted today.
