Obama supports the British premier: “backdoors” are needed in encryption

Last week I wrote about the plans of the British Prime Minister Cameron to ban encryption tools that do not have “backdoors”, which could be used by the special services. And now President Obama has officially announced that he holds the same position. Speaking about the need to increase the cybersecurity of his country, he said: “If we find evidence of a terrorist conspiracy, and cannot, despite the telephone number, social network address or email, penetrate [in correspondence and conversations] ... This is a problem ". The president also added that he believes in the patriotism of the workers in Silicon Valley and that they will meet similar demands from the state and special services. About this writes Wall Street Journal .

In the states, intelligence agencies have long been engaged in surveillance and wiretapping of calls, e-mail and social networking, with and without orders. However, in the post-Snouden era, when the real scale of such wiretapping came to the surface, when the manufacturers of smartphones and operating systems to them embed protection and encryption, which work by default, this “golden age” of the special services suddenly ended. Obama believes that there should be a way in which the communication will be private, but at the same time agencies with three-letter names will have a way to listen to all communication by a court decision. Interestingly, the Clinton administration tried to push a similar initiative in the 90s, demanding to embed decryption in encryption devices, but was defeated.

Security experts rightly point out that if there is a master key, the security system will be vulnerable - any hacker who steals this key will be able to easily hack the system. Christopher Soghoyan, an engineer at the American Civil Liberties Union, wonders how you can talk about cybersecurity and complain about encryption in one speech.