Some common sense on data encryption

[Commentary] In the wake of the horrific terrorist attacks in Paris, US law enforcement officials are predictably calling for wider ranging changes to electronic surveillance laws, including limitations on data encryption technologies, which can keep messages, conversations, and other digital exchanges undetected or undecipherable. This despite the fact that, so far at least, there is no evidence that encrypted information played any part -- let alone a leading role -- in the terrorist acts. The attack has unleashed the full range of hyperbole, with law enforcement officials arguing that encryption is largely to blame for the failure to prevent the violence, and privacy advocates insisting that regardless of how the terrorists communicated with each other, technology regulation should play no part in the solution. Here’s my unpopular view: both sides are wrong, and they know it.

Right or wrong, technical obstacles for government agencies tasked with thwarting terrorism will only grow more overwhelming. Legal reform, if it happens, will only be a stopgap solution on the road to an Internet that can’t be spied on by anybody. In the United States, resetting the balance remains the job, as it has for over two centuries, of legal limits on search and seizure backstopped up by the Bill of Rights.

[Larry Downes is the project director at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy]