Trump administration escalates attack on data encryption
By
Will Morrow
17 January 2018
The Trump White House is escalating the efforts of the previous Obama administration to circumvent and criminalize encryption of electronic communications and mobile devices used by billions of people around the world.
This was the theme of a speech by Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) director Christopher Wray on January 9 in New York City before an audience of technology corporation heads and government officials. Wray referred to the use of electronic encryption as the “going dark problem,” a phrase coined by former FBI director James Comey as part of the Obama administration’s drive to remove any impediment on government spying. He explained that the issue “comes up in almost every conversation I have with leading law enforcement organizations, and with my foreign counterparts from most countries—and typically in the first 30 minutes.”
Wray claimed that the agency had not been able to act upon warrants to search 7,775 electronic devices because it could not break through their encryption. On this basis, he demanded that technology companies install backdoor systems into all of their devices that could be used by the intelligence agencies.
In a speech last October, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein went even further, singling out not only encryption of electronic devices, but the use of so-called end-to-end encryption in messaging systems, which are incorporated in mobile phone applications such as Whatsapp and Signal by default. The number of people using these applications has exploded to more than one billion, particularly in the wake of Edward Snowden’s 2013 exposure of mass NSA spying.
End-to-end encryption relies on the principle of a public-private…