In the mid-90s the US government proposed that Clipper be used as the universal encryption standard for secure electronic communications in the civilian realm, all other cryptosystems being presumably forbidden. It was based on the idea of key escrow: that all Clipper keys be held in an archive and law enforcement could recover a copy of the encryption key for any given Clipper chip upon providing legitimate authorization to intercept communications. However, the Skipjack protocol used by the chip was buggy and insecure, and consumer CPUs became powerful enough that military-grade encryption was practical in software, rendering Clipper moot. A series of First Amendment rulings protected the proliferation of such software cryptosystems under the rubric that computer program code was protected speech.
The Meta ruling gives the government an effective stick, First Amendment notwithstanding: if you facilitate communication that the government cannot break into, and someone abuses a child with help from your secure platform, you could be liable for contributing to the abuse of that child. A safe harbor from liability will be provided—by adopting key escrow based encryption (if you support encryption at all). This does not interfere with protected speech about cryptosystems, but it makes using cryptosystems difficult in practice due to the chilling effects.
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In the mid-90s the US government proposed that Clipper be used as the universal encryption standard for secure electronic communications in the civilian realm, all other cryptosystems being presumably forbidden. It was based on the idea of key escrow: that all Clipper keys be held in an archive and law enforcement could recover a copy of the encryption key for any given Clipper chip upon providing legitimate authorization to intercept communications. However, the Skipjack protocol used by the chip was buggy and insecure, and consumer CPUs became powerful enough that military-grade encryption was practical in software, rendering Clipper moot. A series of First Amendment rulings protected the proliferation of such software cryptosystems under the rubric that computer program code was protected speech.
The Meta ruling gives the government an effective stick, First Amendment notwithstanding: if you facilitate communication that the government cannot break into, and someone abuses a child with help from your secure platform, you could be liable for contributing to the abuse of that child. A safe harbor from liability will be provided—by adopting key escrow based encryption (if you support encryption at all). This does not interfere with protected speech about cryptosystems, but it makes using cryptosystems difficult in practice due to the chilling effects.