Administration's Respect for Law Questioned After NSA Director Asks Tech Companies for Backdoor

The day after NSA Director Mike Rogers said again that technology companies have a responsibility to create a “framework” that would let the agency access data and communications, even if encrypted, the Electronic Frontier Foundation questioned whether President Barack Obama’s administration truly believes the rule of law is important. During a cybersecurity conference at the New America Foundation on Monday, Rogers said the tech community should allow the NSA access, despite repeated warnings from security experts that limiting “backdoor” access to only “good guys” is not actually possible. A blog post Tuesday by EFF Staff Attorney Nate Cardozo and EFF Global Policy Analyst Eva Galperin said that “once you build a backdoor (even if you call it something else) you can't be sure who will walk through it. And there's plenty of evidence that governments, especially the Chinese government, target law enforcement backdoors in technology products in order to gain the same level of access to user data (without legal oversight) that the NSA is so keen to get for itself.” Yahoo Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos asked Rogers during Monday’s panel discussion whether the tech company, which has 1.3 billion users worldwide, also should create a backdoor for the Chinese, Russian, Saudi Arabian, Israeli and French governments as well. Rogers acknowledged the “international implications” but said, “I think we can work our way through this.” Why should "we believe that other countries would follow that legal framework and not simply ignore that framework and attack the law enforcement access point?” EFF asked. “If the rule of law is as important as we all apparently agree, this is a great opportunity for the Obama Administration to tell the courts here that intercepts may only be accomplished with actual legal process,” EFF said. “Until then, it's hard to take seriously the Administration's magical thinking: that a technological security hole -- as Stamos put it, ‘like drilling a hole in the windshield’ -- can be protected by a ‘framework.’ The only thing we can trust is math, and the strong encryption that implements it.” The White House had no immediate comment.