Strong end-to-end encryption is legal in the United States today, thanks to our victory in what's come to be known as the Crypto Wars of the 1990s. But in the wake of Paris and San Bernardino, there is increasing pressure from law enforcement and policy makers, both here and abroad, to mandate so-called backdoors in encryption products. In this presentation, I will discuss in brief the history of the first Crypto Wars, and the state of the law coming into 2016. I will then discuss the current proposals to weaken or ban encryption, covering proposed and recently enacted laws in New York, California, Australia, India, and the UK. Finally, I will discuss possible realistic outcomes to the Second Crypto Wars, and give my predictions on what the State of the Law will be at the end of 2016.
Nate Cardozo (@ncardozo) is a Staff Attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He focuses on the intersection of technology, privacy, and free expression. He has defended the rights of anonymous bloggers, sued the United States government for access to improperly classified documents, and lobbied Congress for sensible reform of American surveillance laws. In addition, he works on EFF's Coders' Rights Project, counseling hackers, academics, and security professionals at all stages of their research. Nate also manages EFF's Who Has Your Back? report, which evaluates service providers' protection of user data. Nate has projects involving automotive privacy, speech in schools, government transparency, hardware hacking rights, anonymous speech, public records litigation, and resisting the expansion of the surveillance state. Nate has a B.A. in Anthropology and Politics from the University of California, Santa Cruz and a J.D. from the University of California, Hastings where he has taught legal writing and moot court.
Neil Farquharson, Technology Evangelist, Zix Corp. takes technical subjects and distills them down into easily understandable summarized forms. A former soldier, engineer and operations manager, he relocated from the U.K. to the U.S. in 2003. Since then, he has been a regular speaker at IT security and telecoms events.