House Bill Would Pre-empt State, Local Governments From Banning Encrypted Smartphones

House legislation that would preclude states and localities from banning encryption on smartphones sold within their borders was introduced Wednesday by Reps. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., Blake Farenthold, R-Texas, and others who cited the need for such a bill to pre-empt actions proposed by state legislators in California and New York. “A patchwork of 50 different encryption standards is a recipe for disaster that would create new security vulnerabilities, threaten individual privacy and undermine the competitiveness of American innovators,” said Lieu in a news release. “It is bad for law enforcement, bad for technology users, and bad for American technology companies. National issues require national responses." Farenthold said "the California and New York proposals do not solve the problem. We need to keep free market and trade between the several states robust, not promote a false sense of security and require things like backdoors and golden keys that can be exploited by hackers.” They said the Ensuring National Constitutional Rights for Your Private Telecommunications (Encrypt) Act has been endorsed by several industry groups including the Internet Association and the Information Technology Industry Council. TechFreedom President Berin Szoka said in a news release that encryption "should absolutely be a federal issue. Congress should, indeed, be careful about preempting state laws, but the Internet is an inherently interstate medium. There’s just no reason that states or localities should have any role in regulating Internet services or devices.” Encryption has become a heated issue, especially for federal law enforcement officials like FBI Director James Comey, who has repeatedly said secure communications and data make it harder for agencies to investigate terrorism and criminal cases (see 1512100032).