The Trump administration is considering the possibility of banning end-to-end encryption, as used by services like Apple’s Messages and FaceTime, as well as competing platforms like WhatsApp and Signal.
The topic was reportedly the main topic of a previously-unreported meeting of a National Security Council meeting on Wednesday …
Politico cites three sources for the story.
The meeting reportedly discussed two options.
The encryption challenge, which the government calls “going dark,” was the focus of a National Security Council meeting Wednesday morning that included the No. 2 officials from several key agencies, according to three people familiar with the matter.
No decision was reached given strongly opposing views within the government.
“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.
We’ve repeatedly argued – before and after Apple’s battle with the FBI – that breaking end-to-end encryption is too dangerous, and that any backdoor created for use by the good guys will inevitably be discovered and exploited by the bad guys.
DHS is internally divided. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency knows the importance of encrypting sensitive data, especially in critical infrastructure operations, but ICE and the Secret Service regularly run into encryption roadblocks during their investigations.
The British security services recently came up with a proposed alternative to banning end-to-end encryption: requiring Apple and others to secretly add law enforcement as invisible chat participants. Apple was one of a number of tech companies and others to strongly condemn the so-called ghost proposal.
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