Kerry backs government access to encrypted data

Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday seemed to endorse providing law enforcement with some form of access to encrypted communications with the appropriate warrant.

{mosads}Asked by Bloomberg’s Emily Chang if he believed there was a “clear government interest in requiring backdoors on encrypted technologies,” Kerry argued that data guarded by encryption is still subject to “lawful availability.”

“There’s no reason that that information is more protected than other kinds of records that [are] subject to lawful subpoena and lawful availability where it meets a standard of probable cause,” Kerry said.

Kerry’s comments appear to diverge subtly from the White House’s carefully neutral position on the debate. Some see the White House gravitating toward greater support of robust encryption.

The Obama administration last year considered, and then dismissed, several legislative proposals that would have required companies to decrypt data upon government request.

The FBI and law enforcement officials have for years warned that extremists are increasingly using encrypted platforms to “go dark” and hide their plans from authorities.

But the tech industry and privacy advocates have resisted providing investigators with any guaranteed access, insisting that would create backdoors, or security vulnerabilities, that hackers and spies could exploit.

The dispute burst into the public consciousness earlier this year when Apple refused to help the FBI crack into the locked iPhone of one of the San Bernardino, Calif., shooters, citing the security and privacy of everyday users of the device.

Kerry stopped short of endorsing a policy prescription for the so-called going dark problem and instead broadly appealed in favor of U.S. surveillance practices.

“As I think about it, we’ve gone overboard in many ways to limit the intrusiveness and at the same time protect the American people,” he said.

“I will say to you bluntly, there are any number — in the double digits — in plots that have been interrupted where many lives might have been lost were it not for our ability to take massively gathered — not individual — information and make sense of it. And anonymously gathered, I add,” he said.