Senate encryption bill draft mandates 'technical assistance'
"A covered entity that receives a court order for information or data shall provide such information or data in an intelligible format; or provide such technical assistance as is necessary to obtain such information or data in an intelligible format or achieve the purpose of the court order."<p>Okay, so I get that the main section of the bill requires companies which provide encryption to decrypt data upon receiving a court order demanding access to it. If the company is capable of decrypting its customers' data, that's a scary thought.<p>But it's followed by two <i>very</i> conflicting subsections: (b) nothing in this act may be construed to require or prohibit any specific design or operating system to be adopted by any covered entity, but (c) a provider of remote computing services to the public shall ensure such products are capable of complying with a court order to decrypt.<p>It seems like this could be read as "you must build backdoors", but also as "we're not telling you how to architect your product." These two sections are completely at odds.<p>By the way, Scribd sucks. Have a downloadable PDF: <a href="https://josephhall.org/f0eabaa89b8ee38577bf7d0fd50ddf0d58ecd27a/307378123-Burr-Encryption-Bill-Discussion-Draft.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://josephhall.org/f0eabaa89b8ee38577bf7d0fd50ddf0d58ecd...</a> (it's still just non-OCR'd images though :<)