New State Laws Could Make Encryption Widespread

New laws that took effect in Nevada on Oct. 1 and will kick in on Jan. 1 in Massachusetts may effectively mandate encryption for companies' hard drives, portable devices, and data transmissions. The laws will be binding on any organization that maintains personal information about residents of the two states. (Washington and Michigan are considering similar legislation.) Nevada's law deals mostly with transmitted information and Massachusetts's emphasizes stored information. Between them the two laws should put more of a dent into lax security practices than widespread laws requiring customer notification of data breaches have done. (Such laws are on the books in 40 states and by one estimate have reduced identity theft by 2%.) Here are a couple of legal takes on the impact of the new laws.

Comments

How exactly will this work ?

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Forcing idiots to encrypt sensitive files will ...

force idiots to encrypt files (not the ones they should encrypt, obviously) using the password "password" ...

and

lose half the data, believing they encrypted it

and

send the data to half their family, especially anyone claiming to be a hacker, with the subject line "can you tell me the password for this file", who'll put it online on wikileaks (who'll happily -and proudly- publish extremely private information on anyone they don't like, laws and privacy be damned)

Well at least, when the honeymoon's over and it's time for Barack O. to publish his email correspondance he can claim to have "encrypted it" and then send a random string, telling the judge the password has something to do with a very dark hole where apparently many claim the sun does not shine.

Ironic... or just interesting

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

How interesting and ironic that not that long ago (1991) possessing encryption tools was considered as munitions!

It used to be that Philip Zimmermann was getting hassled for his creation of PGP.

Boy we've come a long way. Check out the Wikipedia entry on PGP if you can

Company laptops will be enctypted...

[sakdoctor]

but clueless users will write the password on a post it note, and probably burn a plaintext CD copy to leave lying around.
Government agencies will be worse.

Re:mofo.com?

[hajihill]

Assuming here that the above poster is being funny, I'll clear this up for those this might actually cause some concern.

Morrison & Foerster is a internationally recognized and prestigious law firm established in 1883, that has been going by the nickname MoFo since 1973. More on the linked wikipedia article for those still interested or skeptical.