Week ahead: Encryption fight poised to heat up

Lawmakers left Washington for their summer recess with unfinished work on encryption.

The debate over whether to force tech companies to help law enforcement access encrypted data is heating up again, with lawmakers expressing frustration over the lack of progress.

At a hearing on Thursday, Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) chided his colleagues on the Senate Armed Forces Committee over Congress’s inaction.

{mosads}”We are furthering the cause of child pornographers and human traffickers,” said McCain.

The debate over encryption will only intensify following Thursday’s attack in Nice, France, as officials look to see if more can be done to prevent future attacks.

The Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this year released a bill that would require companies to provide the government “technical assistance” to access data.

The bill, crafted by the leaders of the Intel panel, Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and ranking member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), though was dead on arrival with opposition from civil libertarians and concerns from the tech industry.

Privacy advocates still see banning unbreakable encryption as a civil liberties issue and the nation’s most respected minds on encryption nearly uniformly argue there is no way to provide a backdoor for the government to read encrypted files that bad actors will not also exploit.

Another bipartisan proposal from House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mike McCaul (R-Texas) and Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), aims to strike a compromise path, creating a commission to study solutions to the encryption problem.

That approach has been endorsed by Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

House Homeland Security Committee Counsel Joan O’Hara said this week that lawmakers were “hopeful” the Senate Homeland Committee would mark up the bill in September, when Congress returns.

At McCain’s hearing on Tuesday, the encryption commission was mentioned more than once as a possible way for Congress to end the impasse.

But its unclear if the bill will be ready in September.

“The committee continues to review the legislation and should know more about a future markup as the summer progresses.” A staffer from the Senate Homeland Committee told Politico.

Even as lawmakers’ attention turns to the party conventions and election, O’Hara predicts talks will continue to hammer down a workable bill. 

More stories:

The DNC hacker known as Guccifer 2.0 shared new documents with The Hill. 

Microsoft won a victory in a landmark international warrant case touching on user privacy. 

China hacked the FDIC, according to a Senate report. 

Meet the government privacy watchdog that started work less than a week before the Snowden leaks went public.

Lawyers for Hillary Clinton made their second court filing in a week on Friday aiming to block a federal judge from having her be deposed as part of an ongoing open records lawsuit connected to her email setup.

A controversial background check database is being offered for sale on the dark web.

European officials on Tuesday gave the final stamp of approval to a long-awaited data transfer deal between the U.S. and the European Union, allowing the agreement to go into effect after more than eight months of negotiations.

A Chinese businessman has been sentenced to 46 months in prison for participating in a years-long conspiracy to hack into the computer networks of major U.S. defense contractors, steal sensitive military information and send the stolen data to China.

A federal judge in New York on Tuesday ruled that law enforcement officers need a warrant before using a device that mimics cellphone towers to help track a person’s mobile phone.