California state legislators have joined New York state in considering whether to ban the sale of electronic devices that offer unbreakable encryption. The seller of any device that couldn’t be decrypted on-demand would be subject to a $2,500 fine per device.
California assembly member Jim Cooper (D-9th) introduced the legislation — bill 1681 — which requires any smartphone manufactured “on or after July 1, 2015, and sold in California after that date” to be “capable of being decrypted and unlocked by its manufacturer or its operating system provider.”
That’s right, the bill is retroactive back to July 1, 2015. So companies could be subjected to fines for phones sold BEFORE the law was passed! Which hopefully will NOT happen.
If such a bill becomes law, it would virtually ban the sale of all iPhones, and most Android devices in the state. Apple is based in the state, its headquarters are located in Cupertino, in the northern part of California. So ironically, Apple would no longer be allowed to sell its iPhones in its home state.
A number of government officials have called for relaxed encryption methods, saying the strong encryption methods used by Apple, Google, and other technology firms allow criminals and terrorists to communicate without the fear of their messages being decrypted, the companies have maintained such access would also allow access by those very same bad actors.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has strongly maintained that any backdoor provided to law enforcement could also be used by the bad guys to access a customer’s data. Apple’s iOS 8 operating system for mobile devices introduced a data encryption package that the company itself cannot crack, even if presented with warrants ordering them to do so.
Apple and Google have not yet commented on the bill, likely because they’re still trying to get their head around the stupidity of it all.
