McCaul’s Crypto Commission: First, Do No Harm

Tags: 2010s Digital Security Government Policy

Authors: White, Nathan

Published: February 2016

URL: https://www.accessnow.org/mccauls-crypto-commission-first-no-harm/

Abstract: On March 2, 2016, AccessNow published an article about the proposed McCaul-Warner Encryption Commission, which would “create a bipartisan commission of experts to study the debate over encryption and provide recommendations for overcoming the current impasse.” The article notes that despite their good intentions, “the commission, as proposed, might not produce what” they expect. The proposal relies on “the assumption that people from both ‘sides’ of the debate have not already engaged with one another in good faith” when in fact they did in the 1990s and more recently. While the article notes that there are some positive aspects of the commission, it states that “the devil is in the details” and the details, as they stand, “leave considerable room for creating a work product that could take this debate backward rather than forward.” These details include the fact that the commission’s funding structure is opaque, the people who can be on the commission are limited due to the short length of the commission and the time it takes to get a security clearance, six of the sixteen slots will go to law enforcement or intelligence services, there is a “perverse incentive not to seek consensus for addressing difficult issues, but instead to score a ‘win’ or a political talking point.”