NSA Apologist Offers Solutions To 'Encryption' Problem, All Of Which Are Basically 'Have The Govt Make Them Do It'
Benjamin Wittes, one of the NSA apologists ensconced at Lawfare, has written a long piece in defense of FBI head James Comey's assertions that there must be some way tech companies can give him what he wants without compromising the privacy and security of every non-terrorist/criminal utilizing the same broken encryption.
What he suggests is highly problematic, although he obviously pronounces that word as "pragmatic." He implies the solution is already known to tech companies, but that their self-interest outweighs the FBI's push for a "greater good" fix.The theory is that companies have every incentive for market reasons to protect consumer privacy, but no incentives at all to figure out how to provide law enforcement access in the context of doing so.There's some truth to this theory. Tech companies are particularly wary of appearing to be complicit in government surveillance programs as a couple of years of leaks have done considerable damage to their prospects in foreign markets. Wittes suggests the government isn't doing much to sell this broken encryption plan, despite Comey's multiple statements on the dangers posed by encrypted communications. And he's right. If the government truly wants a "fix," it needs to start laying the groundwork. It can't just be various intel/law enforcement heads stating "we're not really tech guys" and suggesting tech companies put the time and effort into solving their problems for them.If we begin—as the computer scientists do—with a posture of great skepticism as to the plausibility of any scheme and we place the burden of persuasion on Comey, law enforcement, and the intelligence community to demonstrate the viability of any system, the obvious course is government-sponsored research. What we need here is not a Clipper Chip-type initiative, in which the government would develop and produce a complete system, but a set of intellectual and technical answers to the challenges the technologists have posed. The goal here should be an elaborated concept paper laying out how a secure extraordinary access system would work in sufficient detail that it can be evaluated, critiqued, and vetted; think of the bitcoin paper here as a model. Only after a period of public vetting, discussion, and refinement would the process turn to the question of what sorts of companies we might ask to implement such a system and by what legal means we might ask.Thus ends the intelligent suggestions in Wittes' thinkpiece. Everything else is exactly the sort of thing Comey keeps hinting at, but seems unwilling to actually put in motion. It's the government-power elephant in the room. Actually, several elephants. It's the underlying, unvocalized threat that lies just below the surface of Comey's government-slanted PR efforts. Wittes just goes through the trouble of vocalizing them.


