Coders: Critical data would be in danger

Access to encrypted communications opposed by group.

SAN FRANCISCO — An elite group of code makers and code breakers is taking American and British intelligence and law enforcement agencies to task in a new paper that evaluates government proposals to maintain special access to encrypted digital communications.

On Tuesday, the group — 13 of the world’s pre-eminent cryptographers, computer scientists and security specialists — were to release the paper, which concludes there is no viable techni- cal solution that would allow the U.S. and British governments to gain “exceptional access” to encrypted communications without putting the world’s most confifidential data and critical infrastructure in danger.

The report was to be released a day before James B. Comey Jr., the director of the FBI, and Sally Quillian Yates, the deputy attorney general at the Justice Department, are scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the concerns that they and other government agencies have about “going dark” - the fear that new encryption technologies will prevent them from monitoring the communications of kidnappers, terrorists and other adversaries.

The authors of the report said such fears did not justify putting the world’s digital communications at risk.

Given the inherent vulnerabilities of the Internet, they argued, reducing encryption is not an option. Handing governments a key to encrypted communications would also require an extraordinary degree of trust. With government agency breaches now the norm, the security specialists said authorities cannot be trusted to keep such keys safe from hackers and criminals. They added that if the U.S. and Britain mandated backdoor keys to communications, it would spur China and other governments in foreign markets to do the same.