Congress loves to name its bills with acrostics, and in the case of the newly reintroduced ENCRYPT Act, it could spell out significant implications for privacy and cybersecurity.
For those of you keeping track at home, ENCRYPT is the Ensuring National Constitutional Rights for Your Private Telecommunications Act.
Congressman Ted Lieu of California says, for one thing, it avoids the nightmare of having dozens of different privacy standards.
At a high level, the ENCRYPT Act calls for a unified national approach to encryption, and pushes back against the government's stated need for a backdoor of some kind.
Co-sponsor Congressman Jim Jordan made this very clear in his statement: “We know federal agencies have abused warrant-less surveillance in the past. The current patchwork system for encryption makes it easier for further abuses of the system and increases the problem by creating potential opportunities for abuse by 3rd party actors."
A slew of technology associations and think tanks jumped on board the train to explain their support, such as the New America think tank's Technology Policy Institute.
“Despite a wave of news stories and an Inspector General report showing that encryption is not the insurmountable obstacle that the FBI, prosecutors, and state and local police claim, the second Crypto War is unrelenting," the institute says.
"Law enforcement has lost credibility in this debate, and Congress should reject their continuing calls for legislation to help them break encryption. We welcome the introduction of the ENCRYPT Act as a step toward putting this endless debate over encryption backdoors to bed once and for all.”
Read the ENCRYPT Act statements for yourself to see what your tech association is saying.
The ENCRYPT Act of 2018 is identical to the ENCRYPT Act of 2016, introduced to try to do the same thing: Ban states from setting their own encryption rules and instead require a federal standard to be adopted.