Encryption solution in wake of Paris should come from Washington not Silicon Valley

[Commentary] In the wake of the terrible terrorist attacks in Paris, law enforcement officials in Washington are again calling on technology designers to dumb down user’s Internet security to enable guaranteed access to all data and communications, even if encrypted. Top law enforcement officials have renewed their hope that the wizards of Silicon Valley might just design their way out of this problem. As Attorney General Loretta Lynch said, “The hope, perhaps, is that Silicon Valley, having engineered a problem, might just engineer a solution too.” Will it help to ask Silicon Valley to go back and try harder? I doubt it. Any surveillance technology -- once deployed globally as part of smartphones, apps or web-based services -- will be available to all governments. We will not be able to limit it to the governments that have good human rights practices.

So, even if we think we have an exceptional access solution for Apple or Google to deploy, we have to imagine whether it’s tolerable for it to end up in the hands of bad actors. This puts both users and Internet companies in the impossible position of either compromising basic human rights or forgoing access to the world’s largest markets such as China and Russia. The way to encourage people out into the light is not by building increasingly intrusive surveillance tools with back doors everywhere, but to show there is a genuine human rights framework that protects Internet users from unjustified and unchecked surveillance.

[Weitzner is director of the MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative and principal research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. From 2011 to 2012 he was White House deputy chief technology officer for Internet policy.]