Politico: American Officials Met to Discuss Outlawing Encryption ⇥ politico.com

Eric Geller, Politico:

Senior officials debated whether to ask Congress to effectively outlaw end-to-end encryption, which scrambles data so that only its sender and recipient can read it, these people told POLITICO. Tech companies like Apple, Google and Facebook have increasingly built end-to-end encryption into their products and software in recent years — billing it as a privacy and security feature but frustrating authorities investigating terrorism, drug trafficking and child pornography.

“The two paths were to either put out a statement or a general position on encryption, and [say] that they would continue to work on a solution, or to ask Congress for legislation,” said one of the people.

But the previously unreported meeting of the NSC’s so-called Deputies Committee did not produce a decision, the people said.

Mike Masnick, Techdirt:

It’s been said before, but this is not a debate. There is no debate. There is no “on the one hand, on the other hand.” There is no “privacy v. security.” This is “no privacy and weakened security v. actual privacy and actual security.” There’s literally no debate to be had here. If you understand the issues, encryption is essential, and any effort to take away end-to-end encryption is outlawing technology that keeps everyone safe.

You can either have encryption that ensures the safety and privacy of the information it protects, or you have no encryption and everything is compromised. There is no middle ground.