Just a reminder to contact your rep to voice your support for this legislation. It's important to contact them to support good legislation, not just when they do things you don't like.
Elections are coming this fall, and primaries are this summer, for everyone in the House and 1/3 of the Senate. Reps should be particularly sensitive to constituent desires.
Unfortunately my senators (Ron Wyden & Jeff Merkley) are always supporting these things, so writing them asking them to support it would be a waste of time.
only 1% of US senators have any (demonstrated) basic understanding of info sec, and that 1% is Ron. It's a shame. Maybe this fall will bring in more competent folks. On the bright side, since his seat is not up for election this year, the situation can't get worse.
I like the idea as described in general, but the devil is always in the details. Unless I'm missing something, the article doesn't cite a bill number or name, to my frustration. That makes it harder to go look at the text of the bill to see if it is indeed something I should support or not, or to contact my representative to voice my support or disapproval.
The article did mention it was introduced Thursday, so that does narrow it down somewhat, but after a quick search, I haven't found it yet.
Reading this, this looks simple and straightforward. There's additional things I'd like to see, suggested elsewhere in the comments, but I'll be happy to take this, and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
My only worry is that getting a bill passed can require negotiation and compromise. In the process, key bits can be excised or altered, and what was good becomes bad. I hope that doesn't happen. I shall have to keep an eye on this bill.
they should make it so that is not legal to sell any device in the US with such a backdoor and if they really want to spice it up, no US company is permitted to do so for any other country.
> The legislation makes an exception for mandates, requests or court orders that are authorized under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, a 1994 law requiring telephone companies to make changes to their network design in order to make it easier for the government to wiretap phone calls.
What's this mean, precisely? That device-level backdoors would be forbidden, but network-level backdoors would be allowed?
My guess is that they don't want to interfere with long-established procedures for wire-tapping (which probably pre-date 194). But perhaps the effect would be what you suggest.
If so that's good because it is still an important difference that the govt merely orders service providers about rather than mandating that your own device work against you.
"Network-level backdoors", a.k.a. CALEA have already been allowed for two and a half decades. That wouldn't change, but this would prevent them from forcing Apple to backdoor the encryption on your iPhone, for example.
I would say it's safe to assume that the law would protect data that stays on your phone, but would not protect communication. So you could encrypt the contents of your phone but phone calls, SMS, and IM would still be possible to back door.
