TRYING THE BACKDOOR
Our phones hold countless messages, files and
photos — tracings of our everyday life and work.
But in 2013, the whistleblower Edward Snowden
revealed the extent to which the government
was spying on U.S. citizens. Tech companies like
Apple and Google began taking steps to shield
those digital tracings from prying eyes — though
often not their own — by mathematically
scrambling them with encryption.
Apple was one of the first major companies
to embrace stronger “end-to-end” encryption,
in which messages are scrambled so that only
their senders and recipients can read them.
Law enforcement, however, wants access to that
information in order to investigate crimes such
as terrorism or child sexual exploitation.
Barr and other top cops call the problem “going
dark,” as data they used to be able to scoop
up with wiretaps has become harder and
harder to read.
Although most law enforcement officials are
vague about how to solve the problem, security
experts say the authorities are basically asking
for an engineered “backdoor” — a secret
key that would let them decipher encrypted
information with a court order.
But the same experts warn that such backdoors
into encryption systems make them inherently
insecure. Just knowing that a backdoor exists is
enough to focus the world’s spies and criminals
on discovering the mathematical keys that
could unlock it. And when they do, everyone’s
information is essentially vulnerable to anyone
with the secret key.