The Government Wants To Dramatically Weaken Your Encryption. Here Is Why It Should Not. Late last week, reports emerged that, once again, senior United States government officials are contemplating seeking legislation that would ban ordinary citizens from using encryption that the government cannot easily crack, reviving the battle between the government – which believes that encryption hampers its efforts to monitor the communications of terrorists and criminals – and technology firms that wish to offer the best security to their users. The new proposal would impact every user of Whatsapp and other tools that offer end-to-end encryption – that is, that allow users to carry on conversations that are encrypted in such a fashion that the chat-service provider itself cannot decrypt them. 1. There is no evidence that allowing law-abiding private citizens to use encryption actually helps terrorists achieve their aims. (If there is such evidence, let the government present it to the public.) At least as far as the public has been told, we have not experienced terrorist attacks that would have been preventable had the government been able to more easily break the encryption of standard messaging tools. In fact, it seems that many communications between terrorists are carried out without any encryption.  As was seen clearly after the Paris attacks in 2015, governmental failure to monitor terrorist communications is arising primarily from other deficiencies – such as not quickly enough identifying the right people to monitor – rather than from the inability of law enforcement and intelligence agencies to decrypt encrypted communications. 2. There are more effective actions to take against terrorists that should come first. Before we ask Americans to surrender privacy in order to gain security, the government should demonstrate that in has acted with competence in all other areas of the war against terror and exhausted other means. As I noted in 2015, when we hear our Commander-in-Chief telling us how ISIS is “contained” days before the organization kills over a hundred people in the heart of Paris, when we barely hear anything from the government when an American student is murdered by a terrorist in the West Bank, when we hear that the Turkish government tried to warn France twice about one of the suspects involved in the Paris killings but that the French did not respond until after the attacks, etc. we have to wonder if there are other much more significant actions that the government could (and should) be taking to combat terrorists before it deems it necessary to strip us of our rights. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/goodmorningliberty/support

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