The top FBI lawyer who tried to force Apple to backdoor its crypto now says working crypto is essential to public safety and national security

Jim Baker served as the FBI's general counsel from 2014 until 2017, and he presided over the the FBI's attempt to force Apple to undermine its cryptography under the rubric of investigating the San Bernadino shooters; he has long been a prominent advocate for mass surveillance, but he has had a change of heart: in a long, detailed essay on Lawfare, Baker explains why he believes that governments should not seek to introduce defects into cryptographic systems.

Baker's argument is primarily instrumental: he rejects the idea that you can create cryptography that works perfectly when it's being used to protect good guys, but fails completely when bad guys try to use it. He acknowledges that any effort to ban working cryptography would simply send American criminals to offshore software repositories to get access to working crypto, and that in so doing, it would be much harder for American law enforcement to spy on its adversaries, because the metadata from their encrypted communications would be out of US law enforcement's reach.

Baker is primarily responding to Attorney General William Barr's idiotic call to ban working crypto as a matter of public safety, and he builds on the usual instrumental arguments about the limited utility of crypto bans for law enforcement with a less-often-heard argument about national security and public safety.

Baker discusses how Huawei (and other companies with deep ties to nations that the US considers to be its rivals) will inevitably have some of its gear within the US's communications infrastructure. Read the rest