OTI Report Recommends Protecting Encryption, Cites Lessons From ‘Crypto Wars’

Repeat History? Lessons from the Crypto Wars of the 1990s,” outlines reasons why the White House should take a stand against backdoors allowing surveillance and highlights the story of a coalition of companies, civil society organizations and individual experts that won two critical technology battles in the 1990s over “key escrow” solutions and the “Clipper Chip” technology, the release said. The report was released the day after U.N. Special Rapporteur David Kaye presented a report to the Human Rights Council on how “encryption and anonymity are critical to free expression in the digital age,” and a week after the House passed an appropriations bill amendment that would “defund any attempt by the government to request or mandate that tech companies weaken the security of their products to facilitate surveillance,” the release said. “It’s important to reflect on the history of the original Crypto Wars so as not to repeat the mistakes of the past,” said OTI Director Kevin Bankston. After nearly a decade of debate in the 1990s, “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 combating crime,” Bankston said. “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,” he said. “The diverse alliance of privacy activists, tech experts, business leaders, and politicians from both sides of the aisle that banded together to fight the Crypto Wars set an example for Internet advocates that has since been followed in other successful campaigns like the fights for strong net neutrality rules and for post-[Edward] Snowden surveillance reform,” said OTI Senior Policy Analyst Danielle Kehl. “If policymakers fail to heed the lessons of the 1990s -- that encryption is good for the Internet economy, cybersecurity, and our civil liberties -- an equally powerful and broad alliance will stand up to win the fight for our right to encrypt.”