Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Evan Schwarger, your host. On today's show, the war on drugs

and encryption. Has the war on drugs become a war on phones? The Apple FBI saga made encryption

a household issue for arguably the first time ever,

but while that case focused a lot on counterterrorism, as the phone was the workphone of one of the

San Bernardino terrorist attackers, the vast majority of law enforcement's confrontations with the tech

sector seemed to deal with drug investigations, not counterterrorism.

Is the going dark problem really an issue of national security?

Or is law enforcement just trying to solve more drug crimes by getting into the locked phones of drug dealers?

Joining me to discuss this is Eli Dorado, director of the Technology Policy Program at the Mercatus Center, a research center based at George Mason University. Eli, thank you for joining the show again.

Oh, thanks for having me on. So, Eli, you argue that this is not necessarily an issue of public

safety, that this encryption debate is really about social policy and our policy against drugs.

How much is the war on drugs related to the war on encryption? I think they're very much intertwined. And, you know,

I remember when FBI director James Comey was testifying in Congress, he explicitly framed it.

You know, I don't have all the answers.

This is a very difficult question of, you know,

privacy versus public safety.

And I just think that, I think that's wrong.

There is a trade-off here, but it's not just privacy on the one hand,

right? It's also information security. We carry lots of information on our phones. It's not

just about, you know, privacy, stuff that we're embarrassed to have, our financial records,

our health records, strategic information from our businesses, and so on. And then on the other hand,

it's not just public safety. And I would argue actually public safety is just a tiny fraction

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