It's not entirely encouraging because the "national interest" is separate and distinct from civil liberties. That is, if there were a way to do this while keeping the national security intact and trampling over civil rights they'd be all for it.
What is the "civil liberties" you are talking about. It is already well established that the government has a right to (under certain conditions) search through your documents and belongings.
You could also be talking about a civil liberty to be able to run what software you want. However, the hypothetical laws that are covered by this report include ones that only restrict what major companies do; and we already accept limitations on what companies can do. (For example, no one's civil liberties were violated when Microsoft was forbidden from preferentially bundling IE with Windows).
You could also be talking about the civil liberties associated with dragnet surveillance. However, those violations are not a result of the use technology; but rather the surveillance program. They should be regarded in the same fashion as an old fashioned surveillance program.
The only civil liberty that I can make a convincing argument for being directly relevant is the right to bear arms. [0] Interestingly, in my experience, support for encryption is anti-correlated with support for gun rights (myself included).
[0] Is cryptography still classified as a munition?
Interestingly, in my experience, support for encryption is anti-correlated with support for gun rights
IMO this shouldn't necessarily be so. I'm not American but still pretty sure NRA would welcome crypto enthusiasts;-)
At least on my local shooting range there is a lot of different people and possibly the most common trait except liking to shoot is that they aren't convicted of any serious crime :-)
For one: I'm talking about the freedom to do what I describe here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13253207 Without cracking down on the ability to do that, they've achieved nothing on the search warrant front.
They would only need to show that the software they are asking you to unlock does not have the behaviour you describe; which will be easy in the common case of you using default software. If you are using plausibly deniable software, then they could still compel your peers to surrender their passwords unless everyone involved was using plausibly deniable software.
This would put us back to the pre-dark world where the government had access to all digital records that were not maintained by people with super-human op-sec practices.
Further, even if you do have amazing op-sec, they could still attempt to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the data is an encrypted message through non technical means. For example, if they can show that you accessed the alleged data the week before.
Even if there are some cases where, through technical means, one prevents the government access to the data, the number of such cases is still smaller than the number of cases that would be prevented by default encryption.
Right, the idea is you build and distribute a system, such as Signal, built around this concept.
You haven't addressed the civil liberties angle though: should the government be able to make this software illegal? If not, crypto people can design such a system.
Existing warrant processes already get you to the system that you describe, so I don't know why the House would talk about it as some future innovation and change needed, if their goal wasn't to make the system I describe less permitted.
The question is not if the government can make the software you describe illegal. The question is if the government can forbid Apple/Google/Microsoft from making it the default.
Existing warrant processes do not get you to the system I describe, because it is not settled law yet whether or not the government can legally compel you to surrender your key, even in cases where there is no dispute that there is a key.
The fact that there exists hypothetical software that would allow someone to plausibly dispute the existence of the key is not relevant to the above question.
> It is already well established that the government has a right to [...] search through your documents
That's true, but if you hid the documents somewhere the government can't compel you to tell it where the documents are. If you wrote the documents in a secret language the government can't compel you to translate them.
One of the most surprising and encouraging statements to come out of Congress in a while.