In a widely expected move following Apple’s dispute with the Department of Justice over iPhone encryption, a new bill is to be put forward in the Senate that wouldn’t just force the likes of Apple to provide a backdoor to their devices, but would effectively ban end-to-end strong encryption altogether.

Proposed by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California and Richard Burr of North Carolina, both members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the bill would force tech companies to decrypt encrypted data upon receipt of a court order, or to provide any technical assistance required to decrypt it.

The sting in the bill though is that it provides no technical guidance on how companies should achieve this, meaning that in effect strong end-to-end encryption, such as that recently implemented by WhatsApp, Inc., would become illegal due to the fact that such forms of encryption cannot be cracked by any means; in short a company couldn’t implement this form of encryption and comply with the proposed law at the same time.

Not that it provides a lot of solace, but the bill does provide grounds for companies to be compensated for any assistance they are forced to provide.

“The draft [bill] shows how out of touch Senate Intelligence Committee leaders Sens. Burr and Feinstein are with the needs of the American people,” tech activist group Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a statement. “Millions of Americans suffer the loss, theft, or compromise of intimate communications, trade secrets, and identities each year.

“We desperately need more security, not less. Yet this bill would strongly discourage companies from providing it. The draft should never be introduced in a bill and should never advance in the Senate. ”

Open door

It’s been argued many times before, but continue to be ignored by those in power: creating a backdoor in an encrypted system creates an open door to bad actors.

As Wired explains:

Last summer, for instance, more than a dozen of the world’s top cryptographers published a paper warning of the dangers of weakening encryption on behalf of law enforcement. They cautioned that any backdoor created to give law enforcement access to encrypted communications would inevitably be used by sophisticated hackers and foreign cyberspies.

It should also be noted as well that just because American law forces local companies to offer a backdoor, it does nothing to stop someone who wanted to encrypt their data from doing so as the software required to do so is cheaply and freely available.

The only people who lose out from proposals such as this one are the good guys, your average citizen who is doing nothing wrong, while it will be business as usual for the bad guys.

At this current stage the proposed bill in only in draft form so it’s unclear when it will be presented to Congress for approval.

Image credit: pokpok/Flickr/CC by 2.0