Police Officials: Google and Apple Should Censor Encryption Apps in Their Stores

Ross Schulman and Jake Laperruque were quoted in Vice Motherboard about censoring encryption apps in the Google and Apple stores: 

Law enforcement officials, led by the FBI, have been wringing their hands about how strong encryption is making investigating and solving crimes tougher for almost two years now. So far, though, they haven’t really proposed any concrete, workable, solution to change the status quo.

Now, two cops have come up with a novel idea: make Google and Apple police what encryption apps are allowed in their app stores.

Privacy and tech experts were quick to react to the two law enforcement official’s suggestion.

“This isn't just turning Apple into censorship police, it's wrecking Android's entire open model,” Jake Laperruque, a fellow at the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation, said on Twitter.

For Ross Schulman, the senior policy counsel at the Open Technology Institute who previously at Google, “the argument that the app stores should regulate access to encryption is off the charts crazypants.”