If you accept the conceit that the US has three branches of government, a court order and a law are very different things. So even if legislative powers cannot be used for congress to do a thing, the courts may indeed be able to do the same thing via court order.
Another fun fact about encryption in the US is that the government doesn’t want its use and proliferation at all. When computerized encryption became a thing and could be used to protect information on the internet, the US tried to classify it as a technology with national security implications. A person or company would have needed permission from congress to sell products using encryption to foreign customers. Sharing the technology outright would have been illegal in most cases, and with serious consequences.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) along with the NSA has also always tried to define the US wide and essentially western world wide encryption standards. At least initially this meant there were some really serious insecurities in the encryption protocols which the public could see, but they weren’t dealt with because the NSA needed their back door. I wouldn’t assume anything has changed in the last 25 years except for maybe the subtlety and sophistication of how the NSA implements backdoors into the NIST approved encryption algorithms.
I suppose that reasoning would make sense… if this website didn’t give other countries a yellow or red rating for doing the same thing. The coloring of the whole map seems really arbitrary if you compare the descriptions given.
Agree with you about the NSA backdoors thing though. I see no reason why they would have had a change of heart either.
If you accept the conceit that the US has three branches of government, a court order and a law are very different things. So even if legislative powers cannot be used for congress to do a thing, the courts may indeed be able to do the same thing via court order.
Another fun fact about encryption in the US is that the government doesn’t want its use and proliferation at all. When computerized encryption became a thing and could be used to protect information on the internet, the US tried to classify it as a technology with national security implications. A person or company would have needed permission from congress to sell products using encryption to foreign customers. Sharing the technology outright would have been illegal in most cases, and with serious consequences.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) along with the NSA has also always tried to define the US wide and essentially western world wide encryption standards. At least initially this meant there were some really serious insecurities in the encryption protocols which the public could see, but they weren’t dealt with because the NSA needed their back door. I wouldn’t assume anything has changed in the last 25 years except for maybe the subtlety and sophistication of how the NSA implements backdoors into the NIST approved encryption algorithms.
I suppose that reasoning would make sense… if this website didn’t give other countries a yellow or red rating for doing the same thing. The coloring of the whole map seems really arbitrary if you compare the descriptions given.
Agree with you about the NSA backdoors thing though. I see no reason why they would have had a change of heart either.