Encryption & Technical Assistance

Week 7

This week, we're turning back to the ECPA. We'll study part of the Wiretap Act we didn't read earlier in the quarter, as well as parts of the other two titles of ECPA, the Stored Communications Act (SCA) and Pen Register Statute.

We’ll discuss the legal framework in the United States for the encryption technologies you studied with Prof. Stamos. We’ll go over the government’s past efforts to use ECPA and other laws to try to compel the providers of encrypted devices and communications services to decrypt customer data for law enforcement. We’ll also examine the policy debate over whether to change existing law to constrain online service providers’ and device manufacturers’ ability to provide their users (i.e., you) with strong encryption that does not include a mechanism for the provider or law enforcement to access to the plaintext of the encrypted data.

If you’d like to learn more about ECPA and how the government surveils people, but you can’t take the law school’s Modern Surveillance Law class (autumn quarter), Princeton professor Jonathan Mayer has an excellent (though by now out-of-date) course from 2014 on YouTube.

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