Clinton is looking for a middle ground on encryption that experts say doesn’t exist

Hillary Clinton avoided taking a position on how easy it should be for law enforcement to access people's encrypted e-mails and texts during an interview at a women's leadership conference in Silicon Valley, calling the debate a "classic hard choice." Clinton said people have a “legitimate right to privacy,” but she argued that the encryption debate was about finding "the right balance” -- a balance Clinton said she hasn't figured out yet. But there is already a dialogue going on between the Obama Administration and leaders of the technology industry -- and much of it is coming down to the technicalities of how encryption works more than an ideological debate over privacy and national security.

"We had this fight almost 20 years ago, and we thought we'd answered the question -- that the benefits of strong encryption outweigh the needs for tap-ability," said Alan Davidson, vice president and director of New America's Open Technology Institute. But political leaders appear to be re-hashing the same debate in search of a compromise solution that technical experts say does not exist. "Everybody in Washington loves the notion of a middle ground, but the solution people are looking for just doesn't exist," Davidson said. "You can't build a strong encryption system with guaranteed tap-ability."