This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Sunday, May 28th,

2023.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The FBI has long asserted that encryption makes law enforcement more difficult.

What the agency doesn't appear to appreciate is how much harder everyone's job would be in a world

where encryption is either illegal or compromised. Patrick Eddington details the FBI's long and ongoing war on private communication.

Federal law enforcement has a long history of overstating threats in some pretty pointed cases pumping up

those threats contributing to those threats in a sense that is contributing

to the story that ultimately makes these threats

look larger than they are and I feel like and you can tell me if I'm wrong

encryption functions basically the same way, which is, it's an incredibly

useful technology for anything you don't want lots of people to know about and for business for matters of

uh of extreme personal interests like your health, among other things.

What is the basic position of the FBI with respect to communications between and among people that they would like to keep secret.

So this began many, many decades ago with the FBI claiming that what we basically call public key

encryption you know whether you're talking about the the PGB or pretty good

privacy standard or some of the other standards that are used by providers,

let's say like proton mail and so on and so forth.

The FBI's position was that they were quote going dark right that the proliferation of this technology was helping

Criminality to run am right? And that position ultimately was not tenable when they were

actually forced to try to come up with numbers to justify these claims of going dark and all the

rest of that. And they did in in fact inflate the number of electronic devices that

...