Schmidt told me that he supports mandated encryption for the nation's power and electrical infrastructure, though not beyond that.
He also supports Howard Schmidt in his willingness to mandate encryption for the few industries whose disruption could lead to chaos.
One solution is mandated encryption: the government would compel both corporations and individuals to install the most up-to-date protection tools.
Whitfield Diffie, the encryption pioneer, offered a different note of skepticism in an e-mail to me: "It would be easy to write a rule mandating encryption but hard to do it in such a way as to get good results.
"The prevalence of these data breaches, botnets, and other attacks highlight the importance of data security best practices and the need to reject government proposals to weaken security, such as mandating encryption backdoors," he said.
Many people receive and store this information on their devices, even if they do not realize it, which is why we are mandating encryption on all tagged devices across the institution.
In September the administration said it would not seek legal avenues to mandate encryption back doors, but the White House did endorse the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (co-sponsored by Burr), passed by the Senate just weeks ago, which allows private industry to share user information with the government under a veil of immunity from both regulation and the Freedom of Information Act.
Moreover, virtually every business wants to sell its services to customers around the world, yet mandated encryption backdoors will facilitate de facto trade barriers.
Assume for a moment that Australia succeeds in its efforts to legally mandate encryption workarounds for all products offered in its country.
Tragically, the one solution we are seriously considering — mandating encryption backdoors — will undermine the integrity of our networks, as confirmed by information security experts and the government's own defense and intelligence officials.
Tragically, the one solution we are seriously considering — mandating encryption backdoors — will undermine the integrity of our networks, as confirmed by information security experts and the government's own defense and intelligence officials.
