Stephen L. Carter, Columnist

I Side With the 'Bad Guys' on Encryption

Law-enforcement agents want the power to break into secure devices. Why should we trust them?

May 8, 2017 at 5:11 PM UTC

Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of law at Yale University and author of “Invisible: The Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster.”

Tough nut to crack.
Photo by Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images

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One of the more intriguing pearls in FBI Director James Comey’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week was his disclosure that the Bureau has been unable to penetrate the encryption on about half of the 6,000 cell phones seized in the course of various investigations between October and March. To Comey and the senators, this was plainly a problem. I will confess that my own feelings are more mixed.

Let’s start at the top. Criminals and terrorists use cell phones. A lot. Those cell phones contain a trove of information: calls made and received, text messages, lists of contacts. But law enforcement is finding it harder and harder to penetrate the encryption that protects the privacy of ordinary users and bad guys alike.