This is, of course, mostly deeply wrong, while also partially right, but for the wrong reasons. First of all, if we want Americans to be safer we should be demanding more encryption, not less. It is a confused state of mind that, just as we keep hearing about more and more data being leaked and hacked into whether by individual malicious hackers or, potentially, nation states, thinks the “answer” to this is somehow less security, rather than more.
However, in a weird way, Bush is actually correct. In some instances, encryption actually does make the government’s job harder. But that’s a feature, not a bug. Bush should, perhaps, listen to his brother’s former Homeland Security Secretary, Michael Chertoff who recently came out against backdooring encryption, noting:
… we do not historically organize our society to make it maximally easy for law enforcement, even with court orders, to get information. We often make trade-offs and we make it more difficult. If that were not the case then why wouldn’t the government simply say all of these [takes out phone] have to be configured so they’re constantly recording everything that we say and do and then when you get a court order it gets turned over and we wind up convicting ourselves. So I don’t think socially we do that.
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