#64: Encryption is a Global Issue

Tech Policy Podcast

TechFreedom

Technology

4.8 • 45 Ratings

🗓️ 19 April 2016

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When the encryption debate is so often framed as “Apple v. FBI,” it’s easy to forget that digital security is a global issue. Nonetheless, how the United States decides to handle the issue will have an outsized impact on the rest of the world. Evan is joined by Amie Stepanovich, US policy manager at Access Now, an international civil society group dedicated to human rights in technology. She argues that we need global leadership on encryption, starting with the White House. What does President Obama think about encryption? How are other nations reacting to issues of digital security? For more, check out https://securetheinternet.org/.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Evan Swartzfrew, your host. On today's show, the global debate over encryption. Joining me to discuss this is Amy Stepanovich, U.S. Policy manager at Access Now, an international civil society organization
0:22.3	specializing in human rights and technology. Amy, thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me,
0:27.3	Evan. So before we jump into the global debate on encryption, we recently had an episode about
0:32.9	a bill in Congress that got pilloried by critics for essentially banning end-to-end encryption
0:39.8	and Julian Sanchez, a colleague of ours at the Cato Institute, joined the show to talk about that.
0:44.5	So I just wanted to see if you had any thoughts on that U.S. effort on encryption before we jump into
0:48.6	the global debate.
0:50.2	Sure.
0:50.7	What we're seeing right now in Congress is a debate where a lot of people who don't necessarily understand the technology and aren't speaking to people who understand the technology are trying to create a legal solution to a problem that basically technologists have agreed for almost 30 years, over 30 years, that you can't create a solution to. And so the Burr-Finstein
1:13.3	bill is the latest iteration of this, and it basically would undermine security across the
1:20.2	internet. And not only encryption, but also if you read the bill true to its text, it potentially could prevent the deletion of data
1:29.8	and all sorts of other practices that you would consider best practices in regard to digital
1:35.1	security hygiene.
1:35.8	Yeah.
1:36.8	And of course the FBI used to think encryption was a good way to protect against cybersecurity
1:41.0	breaches until funny enough that blog post got deleted from their website
1:45.1	and their rhetoric changed quite dramatically.
1:48.5	And encryption is obviously a global issue because U.S. technology companies do some of them
1:52.4	like Apple, do two-thirds of their business overseas.
1:55.2	And no matter what we do on encryption in the United States, other countries are going to do
1:59.4	different things and other entities, even criminal organizations, could develop their own apps, even if we
2:04.5	mandate backdoors into companies like Google and Apple. So it's important to talk about the global
	...

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