The bill also “allows the Attorney General to issue directives to service providers and device manufacturers to report on their ability to comply with court orders, including timelines for implementation,” the committee’s announcement reveals. “The Government would be responsible for compensating the recipient of a directive for reasonable costs incurred in complying with the directive.”
Furthermore, the committee noted that the bill “Promotes technical and lawful access training and provides real-time assistance” and “Directs the Attorney General to create a prize competition to award participants who create a lawful access solution in an encrypted environment, while maximizing privacy and security.”
Riana Pfefferkorn, associate director of surveillance and cybersecurity at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, calls the bill “a full-frontal nuclear assault on encryption in the United States.” She exclaimed:
“This bill is the encryption backdoor mandate we’ve been dreading was coming, but that nobody, during the past six years of the renewed crypto wars, had previously dared to introduce. Well, these three senators finally went there.”
Andi Wilson Thompson, senior policy analyst at New America’s Open Technology Institute, shares the sentiment, explaining: “This bill is just another attack on encryption, and trying to portray it as a ‘balanced solution’ that could protect privacy is just an attempt to distract from its true intent.” Thompson focuses on issues including digital security, vulnerabilities equities, encryption, and internet freedom.
The Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act “is actually even more out of touch with reality than many other recent anti-encryption bills,” said Andrew Crocker, a senior staff attorney on the civil liberties team of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). He added that the new bill is “even worse than EARN IT,” which he described as “a dangerous anti-speech and anti-security bill that would hand a government commission, led by the Attorney General, the power to determine ‘best practices’ online.”