The House Intelligence Committee’s ranking Democrat on Tuesday said President-elect Donald Trump can expect an uphill battle if he asks lawmakers to legislate digital encryption upon taking office.
Rep. Adam Schiff, California Democrat, denied Mr. Trump will be able to easily regulate and restrict the use of strong encryption during an event Tuesday hosted by Christian Science Monitor, The Hill reported.
Despite anti-encryption efforts recently stalling in the House and Senate, privacy advocates and technologists have sounded new alarms following Mr. Trump being elected to the White House last month.
While Mr. Trump hasn’t weighed in lately on the privacy vs. security debate surrounding increasingly ubiquitous encryption, the self-proclaimed “law and order” candidate for president previously called for a boycott against Apple after the company refused earlier this year to subvert its own security features in order for the FBI to acquire evidence from a slain terror suspect’s password-protected iPhone.
The Justice Department eventually sued Apple in hopes of compelling its assistance, but then relented after acquiring the hacking services of an unknown third-party.
Having been at the forefront of legislative discussions during and after the Apple debacle, Mr. Schiff on Tuesday said Congress remains nowhere close to passing any bills that would govern the use of encryption, according to The Hill.
“On that particular issue though, whatever the president-elect’s views may be — it may cause a few more angry tweets in the direction of the technology sector — I don’t think it’s going to move the Congress a great deal,” Mr. Schiff said. “And at this point in the Congress, we are very far from a consensus over what ought to be done on the encryption issue.”
“As we have seen, a lot of the decisions the president-elect made during the campaign are not necessarily the policies he’s going to follow as president,” Mr. Schiff continued, adding: “It’s very difficult to know what exactly the Trump administration will do in terms of where we draw the line between privacy and security.”
Hank Thomas, a former NSA official, told Reuters last month that he wouldn’t be surprised if Mr. Trump requires tech companies to open up their products to the government upon taking office.
“I imagine (Trump) is going to be a guy who is probably going to mandate back doors,” Mr. Thomas said. “I don’t think he’s ultimately going to be a friend to privacy, and the fearful side of me says he will get intelligence agencies more involved in domestic law enforcement.”
Signal, a popular mobile app that uses end-to-end encryption to protect messages sent between users, recently reported seeing a 400 percent increase in daily downloads following Mr. Trump being elected president.
“There has never been a single event that has resulted in this kind of sustained, day-over-day increase,” Signal’s founder, Moxie Marlinspike, told BuzzFeed last month. “Trump is about to be put in control of the most pervasive, largest, and least accountable surveillance infrastructure in the world. … People are maybe a bit uncomfortable with him.”
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