Encryption Is a Luxury

In 2015, a team of technology experts warned against giving law enforcement special access to encrypted communications. They explained that this special access would “undermine and reverse” the technology industry’s efforts to bolster digital security. The landmark paper addressed a conflict between technology companies and the government that had been brewing for some time. And when Apple and the FBI faced off in court seven months later, computer experts and civil-rights groups rushed to defend Apple as it resisted a federal judge’s order to circumvent its own security features.

The experts said that cooperating with law enforcement would put smartphone users at increased risk of snooping from hackers and the government.That’s certainly true for the tens of millions of iPhone users in the United States, whose devices currently protect their data with strong encryption: A concession to the government’s push for special access to encrypted data would be a tangible step backward for those users’ privacy. But for many of the remaining American smartphone users, strong data encryption was never really an option. Most Android phones don’t encrypt the data that’s stored on the device, and many come with messaging services that don’t encrypt data that’s sent back and forth between devices.