The R Street Institute’s Mike Godwin just published a transcript of his recent talk at a summit attempting to balance the needs of law enforcement and the privacy rights of citizens, in which he attempts to outline his concerns about the FBI’s recent attempt to coerce smartphone manufacturers to build secret “back doors” into their products that would allow law enforcement to bypass the devices data encryption.
After providing an excellent summary of the 4th Amendment, Mr. Gowin poses an excellent question:
“Should our government mandate the kind of profound, extensive backdoor access to every aspect of our personal lives that would be made possible when companies are compelled to hack our security for the FBI? Should we give our police secret keys that unlock everything we might say or do on our smartphones?”
Mr. Godwin went on to discuss the recent anti-encryption bill proposed in the Senate by Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein (the same bill that Kevin Bankston, the director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, recently described as “…easily the most ludicrous, dangerous, technically illiterate proposal I’ve ever seen”), pointing out that the proposed language would create, if implemented, create a dangerous precedent, allowing law enforcement to potentially violate many of our long-cherished civil rights in respect to everyone’s privacy any time they feel that some hypothetical, future threat rears its ugly head:
“The FBI and some other law-enforcement agencies seem to believe the Fourth Amendment grants the government a fundamental right to succeed in every investigation on which it embarks. This is wrongheaded; the amendment is supposed to operate as a limit on government power, not to grant a right to investigatory success[.]”
Godwin concluded by describing how the bill may run afoul of several other Amendments in the Bill of Rights, including the 1st, 5th, and even the 2nd.
As a former attorney for organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Wikimedia, Godwin has plenty of experience with online privacy issues, and his testimony is well worth the time investment of a close and thoughtful read. More about R Street’s policies and goals as well as a brief description of Mr. Godwin’s background can be found by following the appropriate links.
