A Flip On Encryption From Former Fed

In the on­go­ing duel over en­cryp­tion between law en­force­ment and the tech­no­logy in­dustry, the gov­ern­ment has re­peatedly goaded de­velopers to “try harder” to come up with a strong en­cryp­tion stand­ard that still al­lows au­thor­it­ies ac­cess to com­mu­nic­a­tions, a bal­ance that most ex­perts main­tain is im­possible to strike.

But a former top in­tel­li­gence of­fi­cial wants to flip the script.

Mi­chael Mc­Con­nell, who served in high-rank­ing in­tel­li­gence po­s­i­tions un­der two Re­pub­lic­an pres­id­ents, says it’s up to law en­force­ment to “ad­apt to ubi­quit­ous en­cryp­tion.”

“Don’t get in the way of pro­gress,” Mc­Con­nell said Thursday at a pan­el dur­ing an en­cryp­tion sum­mit hos­ted by The Wash­ing­ton Post. “Don’t get in the way of in­nov­a­tion and cre­ativ­ity, be­cause this is go­ing to hap­pen. Some­body’s go­ing to provide this en­cryp­tion.”

Mc­Con­nell’s po­s­i­tion is a com­plete de­par­ture from the per­spect­ive he rep­res­en­ted in gov­ern­ment, a shift he has pub­licly ac­know­ledged. When he ran the Na­tion­al Se­cur­ity Agency in the 1990s, Mc­Con­nell was a vo­cal sup­port­er of the Clip­per Chip, a device de­veloped by the NSA that al­lowed the gov­ern­ment to de­crypt elec­tron­ic com­mu­nic­a­tions.

The de­bate over the Clip­per Chip was a pre­curs­or to the cur­rent dis­cus­sion about en­cryp­tion, but Mc­Con­nell, now a seni­or ex­ec­ut­ive ad­visor at Booz Al­len Hamilton, finds him­self on the oth­er side of the table for this one.

He ar­gued Thursday that the be­ne­fits of law en­force­ment ac­cess to com­mu­nic­a­tions are far out­weighed by the po­ten­tial eco­nom­ic harm of weak en­cryp­tion, which could make wide­spread com­mer­cial es­pi­on­age pos­sible.

“If law en­force­ment starts to change the way they think about this, I think there are many, many ways to carry out the mis­sion, giv­en that you are faced with a situ­ation where tech­no­logy is not go­ing to be re­versed,” he said. “There is a cry­ing need for this kind of data pro­tec­tion, in mo­tion and at rest, to pro­tect the eco­nom­ic in­terests of this coun­try.”

While Booz Al­len Hamilton does of­fer tech­no­logy con­sult­ing ser­vices, the com­pany does not ap­pear to have pub­licly come out in fa­vor of strong en­cryp­tion prac­tices.

Mc­Con­nell ori­gin­ally made his case for en­cryp­tion in a Wash­ing­ton Post op-ed pub­lished this sum­mer, which he co-wrote with former Home­land Se­cur­ity Sec­ret­ary Mi­chael Cher­toff and former Deputy De­fense Sec­ret­ary Wil­li­am Lynn.

On Thursday, his ar­gu­ments were countered by Kir­an Raj, seni­or coun­sel to the deputy at­tor­ney gen­er­al, who has ap­peared in pub­lic re­peatedly to speak in sup­port of the Justice De­part­ment’s push for a key to locked-away com­mu­nic­a­tion.

As FBI Dir­ect­or James Comey has ar­gued, Raj said Thursday that it’s on U.S. busi­nesses to come up with a solu­tion to the en­cryp­tion ques­tion. “We have the most in­nov­at­ive tech com­pan­ies in the world. If someone’s go­ing to solve the prob­lem, it’s go­ing to be the folks in the in­dustry.”

Mc­Con­nell agreed that a se­cure sys­tem that al­lowed for law en­force­ment ac­cess would be ideal, but ques­tioned its feas­ib­il­ity. Asked to choose between en­cryp­tion and ac­cess, he said: “If I have to trade one for the oth­er I would take ubi­quit­ous en­cryp­tion of data in mo­tion and at rest. But I would prefer to have both.”