Bill aims to stop states from banning iPhone encryption


More encryption news...

A bi-partisian bill was introduced in Congress by Ted Lieu and Blake Farenthold with the goal of halting state efforts to force companies to provide backdoors for encryption. This bill follows efforts from New York and California that would ban sale of smartphones such as the iPhone with secure encryption.

Lieu to ArsTechnica:

"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."

As posted earlier, there are other efforts to curtail consumer encryption in Congress, so it will be a topic to watch play out.