US government wants ‘solution’ for encryption

The US government wants to work with technology companies to find a ‘solution’ for encryption. According to Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, encryption poses problems for the security of citizens.

In a speech at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, Secretary Johnson compares the current situation, in which more and more technology companies offer encryption, with the introduction of the telephone. “Imagine the problems if we could only intercept mail after the invention of the telephone,” Johnson said. Instead, the government introduced a wiretap.

Johnson says he recognizes the privacy benefits of encryption, but also notes that encryption makes it more difficult for the police and the secret service to detect criminal behavior and even terrorism. He therefore says that he wants to look for a ‘solution’ together with technology companies, whereby he indicates that there must be a balance between security and privacy.

The police and the secret services have the biggest problems with end-to-end encryption, where the service – such as Telegram or WhatsApp – cannot read the communication. File system encryption, which is standard on iOS but must be manually enabled on most other operating systems, also causes problems for the police.

Civil rights activists object that citizens have the right to communicate confidentially, without the government being able to read the communication. The Snowden revelations, which showed that the US and British secret services did not always take citizens’ privacy very seriously, have reinforced that sentiment.