July 10, 2015
A report from New America’s Open Technology Institute released in mid-June underscores the privacy community’s frustrations at seeing this debate resurface. The report, “Doomed to Repeat History? Lessons From the Crypto Wars of the 1990s,” touches on CALEA, the Clipper chip, export-crypto rules, and numerous other flashpoints in a debate that many participants assumed was settled.
“By the end of the 90s, after nearly a decade of debate, there was a broad bipartisan consensus that policies intended to weaken or restrict access to strong encryption were bad for privacy, bad for security, bad for business, and a bad strategy for combatting crime,” Kevin Bankston, OTI’s director, said in a statement. “Encryption backdoors are just bad policy, period, and that’s as true now as it was twenty years ago—even more so, when we need strong encryption to protect us from a growing range of cyberthreats.”