App Store Censorship and FBI Hacking Proposed at Congressional Crypto Hearing

Tech experts and industry representatives squared off against law enforcement officials in two sessions of lively testimony April 19 in front of the House Commerce Committee. The hearing is the latest in the ongoing battle in the courts and legislature commonly called the second “Crypto Wars,” after a similar national debate in the 1990s.

Two witnesses on the law enforcement panel offered a chilling proposal to deal with the well-documented weakness that any domestic encryption ban would do little against the hundreds of encryption products developed and sold internationally. Thomas Galati of the New York Police Department and Charles Cohen of the Indiana State Police argued that software could be kept off American computing devices by exerting legal pressure on the Android, Apple, and Blackberry app stores. That proposal would seem to leave to app store gatekeepers the nigh-impossible task of ensuring none of the software it carries comes with “warrant-proof” cryptographic options. But worse, it cuts right to the core of fundamental computing freedom questions and cues up the next legislative battle to address what software people are allowed to run on their devices.