Home > News

US Considering Outlawing End-to-End Encryption

By Laura Tucker
News Us End To End Encryption Featured

Time and time again, this issue goes back to a mass shooting that happened in San Bernadino, California, in 2015. The shooters were killed in the attack, but an iPhone was left behind. Law enforcement was not able to gather data off the phone because it was locked. This started the fight between the law and Apple, who refused to provide a backdoor to their phones.

Four years later, it continues to be an issue. Every time the law discovers a way around the problem, Apple tightens its security more. And now that encryption is being used by more and more tech companies, the United States is considering banning end-to-end encryption.

“Going Dark” Problem

End-to-end encryption prevents anyone other than the sender and the recipient from knowing what was in a message by scrambling it. This happens without you even knowing it, as by the time you receive a message, such as in iOS’s Messages app or in WhatsApp, it’s already been unscrambled.

But this just doesn’t sit right with the law, that communication is happening, and they have no way of knowing what you are talking about.

Last week the U.S. National Security Council discussed the problem they describe as “going dark,” as they see encryption being included into more and more platforms. They are considering asking Congress to outlaw end-to-end encryption.

News Us End To End Encryption Code

Apple, as well as other tech companies, rely on encryption to gain their users’ trust. In fact, Apple consistently pushes that ideal, that they care about user safety. The tech industry believes that if they provide backdoors for law enforcement and government, hackers could find a way through it.

But law enforcement knows that encryption sometimes stands in their way of solving crimes. The government officials at the meeting last week considered whether they should continue to look for a solution to “going dark” or whether they should ask lawmakers to outright ban end-to-end encryption.

For the areas of government that enforce safety, such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, they see encryption as vital. But for those who are looking to catch criminal activity, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, they feel blocked. The Commerce Department sees issues with economic security, and the State Department believes it could lead to diplomatic consequences.

The Future of Such Legislation

It’s not believed such a thing can pass Congress, and there is known opposition to such a thing. And Apple, along with other tech companies, will continue to be against something so integral to their users and that they know gives their users a reason to use their systems and devices.

What is your opinion on the government considering such a thing? Do you think legislation to ban end-to-end encryption could be passed? Or do you think there is just way too much opposition? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

Octopuses possess roughly 500 million neurons distributed across their body, with two-thirds located in their arms rather than their central brain, meaning each arm can taste, problem-solve, and react to stimuli independently of whatever the octopus is otherwise paying attention to.
Explore the historic Roman bridge in lush Salamanca, Spain captured beautifully in daylight.
The Roman aqueduct at Segovia, built around the first century AD without mortar, still carried water into the 1970s, its 167 granite arches held together by nothing but the precise weight distribution of stones cut to fit each other within fractions of a millimeter.
When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.