On the Freedom of Ideas: A Review of Fruitless Attempts to Restrict Innovation

"My Greatest Friend is Truth"
Poster by Mary Bowers

To the members of the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary,

We need to talk. Last week on December 10th you held a hearing to evaluate granting law enforcement "lawful access" to the encrypted devices and communications of American citizens. I am not writing to you about how bad of an idea this is (as many have already done) - instead I am writing to explain why I do not believe legislated access to encrypted data will help law enforcement officers.

Encryption is not simply a series of related products offered by Facebook or Google, it is a wide field of mathematical study that has largely been held in the public sphere of academic discourse. It is for this reason that adding these lawful access mechanisms (commonly called "backdoors") rarely works as expected: the information is already out there, so those inclined to keep their communications secret can either use another encrypted product or implement their own.

Ideas and Their Propagation

Let us look at a related historical example. In 1517 Martin Luther published his 95 Theses as a complaint against abuses by the church. This publication was distributed broadly throughout Europe, and despite the best attempts of the church it continued to spread. The world was changed by Luther's writings, and that brave new world he had begun was one in which it was now possible for the reigning power of the church to be questioned.

This illustrates a very important principle: Ideas once spread cannot be taken back. They spread quickly from individual to individual, and once they have been learned you would be hard-pressed to make someone forget. Encryption has spread in a similar way. Open source implementations of industry standard encryption algorithms such as AES and RSA are so easy to come by you can find and download them in seconds.

Why are these ideas so hard to contain? I recently came across an interesting answer to this question in Kant's essay What is Enlightenment. Kant describes enlightenment as a person's ability to think independently - to form ideas without constant need of a mentor or teacher. This kind of enlightened individual will be led evaluate the ideas of those around them, and spread those they find worthy of promoting. Kant believes that enlightenment naturally comes from intellectual freedom: "if [the public] is only given freedom, enlightenment is almost inevitable."

So why do these ideas spread so fast? Because our governments and our political systems leave their citizens free to think for themselves.  Most consider this is a good thing - in America we see these rights as inalienable.

Restricting the Obvious Option

Now you may think that you can simply require all providers of encrypted services (such as Apple, Facebook, and Google) to build their systems with these government mandated backdoors, but it's not that simple. Because the principles of encryption have been developed openly and spread so far, criminals will always have another way to protect their communications.

A similar phenomenon has been observed in drug smuggling. As recently reported by the Washington Post we have seen that criminals adapt in the face of adversity. Traditional prevention techniques such as walls or back-doors only stop those who are willing to play by your rules.

WhatsApp, Messenger, and iMessage are currently the obvious choices for people who want convenient end-to-end encryption of their messages. iOS and Android's built in device encryption are similarly the obvious choices for encrypting data at rest. But it's important to remember that these products are not (and never have been) the only available options. Finding a reputable alternative for any of these isn't even hard.

In Conclusion

Granting law enforcement officers "lawful access" to encrypted communications and devices will not assist officers because:

• Non-compromised implementations of common encryption algorithms are readily available
• Those seeking to avoid the law will not use algorithms known to have backdoors

Trying to regulate secure encryption out of the public memory is not only a flagrant violation of our constitutional rights, it's also just practically impossible. As we saw with Luther you cannot stop the open nature of ideas, and even if you restricted these ideas we have seen that criminals will find ways around those restrictions.  We have entered into the brave and terrifying new world of encryption, and there is no way for us to go back.

My classmate Mary Bowers recently created a poster (shown above) that drew my attention to a quote by Sir Isaac Newton: "Plato is my friend; Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth." Senators I do not doubt your competence, and I am sure you have many brilliant advisors and friends.  But today I plead with you to listen to truth. Please listen to the professionals of the cryptography community. Please consider carefully the value that cryptographic privacy adds to your own communications. And please do not carry out your threat to blindly "impose [your] will" onto technologies you do not entirely understand, or we will all suffer the consequences.

Sincerely,
Cole Erickson