Feinstein-Burr Encryption Legislation Is Dead In The Water (slashdot.org)

An anonymous reader writes from a report via Reuters: After the San Bernardino terrorist attack, key U.S. lawmakers pledged to require technology companies to give law enforcement agencies a "back door" to encrypted communications and electronic devices. Now, the push for legislation is dead only months after the terrorist attack. In April, Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein released the official version of their anti-encryption bill with hopes for it to pass through Congress. But with the lack of White House support for the legislation as well as the high-profile court case between Apple and the Justice Department, the legislation will likely not be introduced this year, and even if it were, it would stand no chance of advancing, said sources familiar with the matter. "The short life of the push for legislation illustrates the intractable nature of the debate over digital surveillance and encryption, which has been raging in one form or another since the 1990s," reports Reuters. Technology companies believe security would be undermined if it were to create a "back door" for law enforcement, while law enforcement agencies believe they need to monitor phone calls, emails, text messages and encrypted data in general for security purposes.

Comments

Good

[MAXOMENOS]

It was stupid legislation crafted by profoundly ignorant people.

Re:Good

[MrKaos]

It was stupid legislation crafted by profoundly ignorant people.

You misspelled "malicious" there, sport. Both of these winners have been a cancer on The People from the beginning.

Malicious indeed dp, according to the draft of the Bill if it had passed so too would the meta-data rentention provisions casually obscured in the definition of "DATA" in Sec 4.5 to include "COMMUNICATIONS IDENTIFYING INFORMATION" defined in Sec 4.1.A-C.

Section 4.1 defined that to be "dialing, routing, adressing, switching, signaling, processing, transmitting and other data that", (A) was *not* the contents of the communication, (B) identifies the origin, destination, time, date, duration, termination or status of each communication generated, received or controlled by a user and (C - here is the kick in the balls) includes (C.i) public, local and source addressing including (C.i.I) local and public IP address, (C.i.II) static or dynamic ports. (C.ii) MAC, IMIE and network service identifiers used by each party, (C.iii) Service address identifiers used by each party (C.iv) QOS, packet size (C.v) all co-ordinated to UTC.

I doubt this is the last you have seen of an attempt to pass a meta-data retention Bill as there were simply no discussion about these provisions in this bill that I saw.

real reason the bill was dropped

[Anonymous Coward]

You had to read all the way to the last sentence of the article to get to the actual reason:

They also said there was reluctance to take on the tech industry in an election year.

The recurring problem

[Mal-2]

The recurring problem is that this can be shot down this year, and next year, and the year after that... but they only have to succeed once, and then we're all stuck with it. Add to that the fact that they can just tack it on to a budget bill and seriously, how are we supposed to stop these things from happening? The attack mode on any Congressman who votes against the budget bill is incredibly scathing, no matter what their justification for doing so, and again, that little problem remains that freedom has to win every battle, while the police state only has to win one.