As the holidays fade, a different kind of conflict emerges—one with far higher stakes than retail debates over seasonal greetings. The government wants to weaken encryption, and this marks a return to
As the holidays fade, a different kind of conflict emerges—one with far higher stakes than retail debates over seasonal greetings. The government wants to weaken encryption, and this marks a return to a battle that already played out once before.
Back in the early 1990s, federal agencies tried to insert hardware backdoors into consumer devices. The NSA, FBI, and other government officials pushed the "clipper chip" as a solution that would let them access private communications. Public pressure and concerns about the scheme's security killed the effort.
That war seemed won. Now it's back.
During the Democratic Primary debate, Hillary Clinton proposed a "Manhattan Project" approach to encryption. She wants the government to collaborate with technology companies to create backdoors—mechanisms that would let authorities monitor encrypted messages while supposedly keeping them safe from criminals. The Manhattan Project reference invokes the atomic bomb program, casting the effort as a grand national challenge that dedicated resources and will can solve.
But there's a problem with this premise. Math doesn't work that way.
"Encryption is derived from mathematics," Anton Chuvakin, a research vice president at Gartner's GTP Security and Risk Management group, told NBC News. "Can you create a math puzzle that only 'a good guy' can solve?" The answer is no. If a master key exists that opens all locks, hackers can run calculations to generate that key themselves. Any technical solution that creates an opening for government access creates an opening for criminals too.
Clinton says she has confidence in tech leaders to solve this impossible puzzle. Those leaders have been clear it cannot be done.
Beyond the technical impossibility sits a more troubling concern: government should not hold the master key to private communication in the first place.
The federal government has a track record of misusing information when it gains access. Elections determine who holds elected office, but vast portions of government employment remain untouched by voting. Career bureaucrats, especially in intelligence agencies, hold significant power without electoral accountability. When given sensitive information, these officials have repeatedly chosen institutional interest over public welfare.
Three historical programs demonstrate how far intelligence officials will go: Operation MOCKINGBIRD, Project CHAOS, and COINTELPRO.
MOCKINGBIRD was the CIA's effort to shape public opinion through the press. Agency officials placed hundreds of journalists on the payroll, both foreign and domestic, and used them to distribute propaganda. The program contributed to the 1954 overthrow of Guatemala's elected president, Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. He had won more than 80 percent of the vote after helping remove a U.S.-backed dictator and campaigned on land reform and sovereignty from outside powers. The CIA arranged his replacement with Carlos Castillo Armas, a military leader aligned with U.S. interests. Armas stripped voting rights from nearly half the population, evicted peasants from their land, and established what became Latin America's first modern death squad.
In 1956, intelligence officials turned their focus inward. The FBI launched COINTELPRO and the CIA began Project CHAOS. Officially, these operations targeted communists. In practice, they surveilled and undermined the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, and other groups the intelligence community deemed threatening to American stability.
The targeting of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. revealed the depth of this abuse. J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director, ordered agents to neutralize King's influence on the civil rights movement. After King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech, William Sullivan, who ran the FBI's domestic surveillance unit, wrote: "Personally, I believe in the light of King's powerful, demagogic speech, he stands head and shoulders over all other Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses. We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security."
The FBI monitored King's private life and sent him a letter posing as correspondence from a black activist. The letter detailed the agency's findings about King's personal affairs and urged him to end his life. Whether the FBI played a role in King's assassination remains disputed; the government sealed the investigative files until 2027.
King was far from alone. COINTELPRO targeted Abbie Hoffman and Bill Ayers for their anti-war activism, Muhammad Ali for his resistance to the draft, and the American Indian Movement. Project CHAOS went further still—CIA officers surveilled thousands of American citizens with no criminal accusations against them, violating their own mandate to operate only overseas.
This history matters because the encryption debate often focuses on whether breaking encryption is possible. The answer is no. But the question that precedes it is whether government should be granted this capability if it became possible.
Communication has become humanity's most effective tool against concentrated power. Authoritarian regimes understand this—Turkey has attempted to ban Twitter, and China maintains the Great Firewall to control the flow of information. Ideas prove more destabilizing to entrenched systems than weapons ever could.
Private conversation requires spaces where people speak without fear of surveillance. When individuals know their words may reach government monitors and trigger consequences, they self-censor. Strong encryption like PGP protects that space.
Modern surveillance reaches beyond digital communications. Government agencies have exposed programs that allow them to activate microphones and cameras in smartphones remotely, whether the devices appear off or on. The capability for privacy invasion exceeds what most people understand.
Protecting strong encryption serves purposes beyond defending against hackers. The government has demonstrated repeatedly that it will exploit access to information against its own citizens. This war on encryption is fundamentally about the right to converse without the state listening. Bitcoin's encrypted foundations protect financial privacy for the same reason: what the government has already done justifies protection against what it might do next.
