Bill could block attempts to weaken encryption

Two US lawmakers across the political divide have proposed a bill to bar states from weakening security encryption in communication devices.

Democrat Representative Ted Lieu, from California, and Republican Representative Blake Farenthold, from New York, had proposed a House bill to prevent states or local governments from forcing OEMs to create such backdoors.

It was not a coincidence that the bill came from the representatives of these states. Both New York and California had proposed legislation, under which, device manufacturers and service providers would be forced by law to provide access to encrypted systems when needed.

According to commentators, in the event the bills became law in these two states only, it would still apply to all devices and services across the US, as manufacturers do not design systems specific to one or two states.

According to Lieu, who holds a degree in Computer Science, it was just technically impossible to allow such an access that would not, by nature, weaken and endanger the security of the system in its entirety. This had been pointed out by many in the tech industry that had seemed to fall on deaf ears in Congress, until now.

Lieu and Farenthold's federal bill would need to pass both the House of Representatives and the Senate and also be signed by the president in order to take effect. If that were to happen before the state bills were enacted, it would pre-empt them.

Lieu told Ars late last night over phone that the introduction of those two state bills got his attention, especially the one in his home state.

"It's very clear to me that the people who are asking for a backdoor encryption key do not understand the technology," he added. "You cannot have a backdoor key for the FBI. Either hackers will find that key or the FBI will let it get stolen. As you saw, it the [Department of Justice] just got hacked. The [Office of Personnel Management] got hacked multiple times. If our federal government cannot keep 20 million extremely sensitive security records, I don't see how our government can keep encryption keys safe."