Holder urges tech companies to leave device backdoors open for police
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said on Tuesday that new forms of encryption capable of locking law enforcement officials out of popular electronic devices imperil investigations of kidnappers and sexual predators, putting children at increased risk.
Context & Ripple Effects
Attorney General Eric Holder used a Department of Justice appearance to argue that new forms of encryption capable of locking law enforcement out of popular electronic devices would imperil investigations of kidnappers and sexual predators — deliberately recasting an industry security decision as a child-safety question rather than a privacy trade-off. The remarks went out over the DOJ's own channels and were picked up the same day by Reuters, the Guardian and Computerworld, an unusually broad footprint for an AG statement that signals the administration wanted this argument heard well beyond Washington.
First-order effects
- Device makers of popular encrypted hardware are now under explicit public pressure from the nation's top prosecutor to preserve police access — aimed at their product design defaults, not any single case.
Second-order effects
- Holder's kidnapper-and-predator framing gives law enforcement officials a reusable public template for the encryption dispute, likely pulling the debate out of technical circles and into congressional and regulatory arenas.
Third-order effects
- If senior-administration pressure keeps building along these lines, the plausible endpoint is mandated lawful-access requirements for consumer devices — a structural collision between device-security engineering and surveillance law that no current framework resolves.
The trend: Senior US law-enforcement leadership is shifting from tolerating strong default device encryption to pressing manufacturers to engineer police access, setting up a possible mandate fight.