This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, July 9, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

FBI Director James Komi doesn't want you to be able to securely encrypt your private

communications, at least not without giving the government

a special key in case they want to read it.

Patrick Edington, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, says encryption is a tool that goes

back to the communications of our founding fathers.

The easiest way to really kind of conceptualize encryption is a way of taking a particular message that you want to send to another person

and essentially scrambling it, finding a way and over the course of the centuries a number of different ways were developed.

And some of these things were what we would call one-time pads, where you would match up a particular letter with a different letter or a number and both of you the writer of

the message and the recipient would have essentially that that same text if you

will that same encryption algorithm to work off of. And of course in the

modern area in the modern era I should say it's become a lot more complicated

but it's still ultimately based on mathematics and so you

you now have the circumstance where because of these smartphones that we have and the

tablets and all the rest of that, a number of manufacturers

both large and small from a giant multinational like Apple all the way down to a

small operation like ShurSpot out in Boulder, Colorado can come up with

applications and services that employ end-to-end encryption to allow you to very

securely send a message to somebody who's also using that same application

and service.

And this has become a big hobby horse and concern for federal law enforcement and for the intelligence community

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