Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast, your source for policy raves and rants from Tech Freedom,

your Washington, D.C. advocate for the

freedom to tinker and innovate. I'm Evan Swartz-Straber, your host. On today's show,

the State of the Union, what will President Obama say tonight about tech policy? Probably nothing,

but that won't stop us from saying it for him. Joining me in our DC studio is Baron Soka, the benevolent overlord and founder of tech freedom.

Baron, it's great to have you on your own show once again.

Thanks for inviting me back.

Well, we'll see if, depending on how you behave today, we'll see if we'll invite you back for a third time.

So we live in a digital age.

It's becoming increasingly

ridiculous that politicians, including the president, just seem to ignore tech policy in these big

ceremonial state of the union addresses that usually don't lead to any sort of action. However,

there are a lot of items this year in 2016 that actually do have some traction and there might

be some movement on tech policy.

So I think it's important for our listeners to understand what those are and what the president

should be saying even if he won't be saying it.

Well, the number one issue that everyone's going to be listening for is encryption.

This has made the headlines in both of the Republican and Democratic debates.

You've had candidates who've been just making things up about encryption, claiming that encryption was somehow

involved in the attacks because the San Bernardino attackers had encryption on their phones,

which by the way everybody does. You're seeing candidates just grab its straws in order to try to say there's something

that has to be done here.

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