The United States federal government should require technology companies to provide lawful access to encrypted communications.

Mitigates - Secure warrant execution protects privacy even with lawful access.

Ijaz 21(Ramla Ijaz, PhD in Computer Science from Yale University, 05/14/21, “Lawful Access: A Survey of Proposed Protocols,” https://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/jf/ijaz2021.pdf 10/2/2025) CJV

LA = Lawful Access The policy debate on LA access can be enriched by information on other areas of research. One such area is secure warrant execution. Researchers have put forward ways in which cryptographic primitives can be used to ensure that warrants for private data are only executed in a secure and accountable manner so that private data is not compromised, and the system cannot be abused by any party [26]. There have also been proposals to ensure government only accesses relevant data when it requests records from third parties, rather than gaining access to a huge data dump [27]. Perhaps a place to start in the LA debate is to bring cryptographic primitives to our legal system, to the warrants and law enforcement access that already take place. If these can be incorporated into our society, people may increase trust in the government because it can be audited by civil-rights groups and there is no way for law enforcement to bypass protocols. Then the LA discussion can go forward in a less hostile environment.

Lawful access with crypto primitives executes warrants securely.

Ijaz 21(Ramla Ijaz, PhD in Computer Science from Yale University, 05/14/21, “Lawful Access: A Survey of Proposed Protocols,” https://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/jf/ijaz2021.pdf 10/2/2025) CJV

LA = Lawful Access The policy debate on LA access can be enriched by information on other areas of research. One such area is secure warrant execution. Researchers have put forward ways in which cryptographic primitives can be used to ensure that warrants for private data are only executed in a secure and accountable manner so that private data is not compromised, and the system cannot be abused by any party [26]. There have also been proposals to ensure government only accesses relevant data when it requests records from third parties, rather than gaining access to a huge data dump [27]. Perhaps a place to start in the LA debate is to bring cryptographic primitives to our legal system, to the warrants and law enforcement access that already take place. If these can be incorporated into our society, people may increase trust in the government because it can be audited by civil-rights groups and there is no way for law enforcement to bypass protocols.

Encryption creates 'going dark' problem for law enforcement.

Eugene Kowel, 3-28-2024, 24, https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2024/03/28/warrant-proof-encrypted-devices-hinder-l aw-enforcement/, Nebraska Examiner, 11-1-2025, \\ CM

However, law enforcement in our country is facing another challenge quickly increasing in magnitude: that even once we identify where critical evidence is located, and go to a judge, and obtain a court-authorized search warrant, we still might not be able to obtain the digital evidence we need. Encryption can prevent us from accessing information locked inside a device or managed by a service provider. Criminals in Nebraska and Iowa are increasingly able to use warrant-proof encrypted devices and communication services to hinder law enforcement. This challenge affects all our state, local, federal and tribal law enforcement partners, impeding our ability to protect our community. When it is necessary to obtain authority from a judge to intercept communications in real time to disrupt gang violence, organized crime, drug trafficking, public corruption, or other conspiratorial activity, bad actors are no longer limited to land lines and cellular phones.

No link - Mass surveillance overloads agencies, causing intelligence failures.

Eddington 15 [Patrick G. Eddington, Senior Fellow @ CATO Institute, 1-27-2015, "No, Mass Surveillance Won't Stop Terrorist Attacks ", https://www.cato.org/commentary/no-mass-surveillance-wont-stop-terrorist-attacks, DOA 10-28-2025] //[BP - Jashyth Lohani]

No, mass surveillance does not prevent terrorist attacks. It’s worth remembering that the mass surveillance programs initiated by the U.S. government after the 9/11 attacks—the legal ones and the constitutionally-dubious ones—were premised on the belief that bin Laden’s hijacker-terrorists were able to pull off the attacks because of a failure to collect enough data. Yet in their subsequent reports on the attacks, the Congressional Joint Inquiry (2002) and the 9/11 Commission found exactly the opposite. The data to detect (and thus foil) the plots was in the U.S. government’s hands prior to the attacks; the failures were ones of sharing, analysis, and dissemination. That malady perfectly describes every intelligence failure from Pearl Harbor to the present day. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (created by Congress in 2004) was supposed to be the answer to the “failure-to-connect-the-dots” problem. Ten years on, the problem remains, the IC bureaucracy is bigger than ever, and our government is continuing to rely on mass surveillance programs that have failed time and again to stop terrorists while simultaneously undermining the civil liberties and personal privacy of every American. The quest to “collect it all,” to borrow a phrase from NSA Director Keith Alexander, only leads to the accumulation of masses of useless information, making it harder to find real threats and costing billions to store. A recent Guardian editorial noted that such mass-surveillance myopia is spreading among European political leaders as well, despite the fact that “terrorists, from 9/11 to the Woolwich jihadists and the neo-Nazi Anders Breivik, have almost always come to the authorities’ attention before murdering.” Mass surveillance is not only destructive of our liberties, its continued use is a virtual guarantee of more lethal intelligence failures. And our continued will to disbelieve those facts is a mental dodge we engage in at our peril.

Turn - Backdoors increase child safety risks by creating vulnerabilities.

Penny and Gibbs 17 (Steven Penney, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Alberta. Dylan Gibbs, JD, University of Alberta, 2018; BSc (Computing Science), University of Alberta, 2013, 2017, “Law Enforcement Access to Encrypted Data: Legislative Responses and the Charter”, mcgill law journal, https://lawjournal.mcgill.ca/article/law-enforcement-access-to-encrypted-data-legislative-responses-and-the-charter/, DOA: 10/5/25)

More importantly, exceptional access would introduce vulnerabilities into encryption systems that could be exploited by malicious actors. To begin, any legislation requiring service providers to build in backdoors for police would generate significant upfront development costs. Many technology experts contend that it is simply not possible to design exceptional access in a way that would allow police in while keeping malicious actors, such as criminals and foreign intelligence agencies, out.66 Even if we assume that this concern is overstated, developing a proposal for secure exceptional access would require extensive research and resources.67 There would also be significant costs associated with replacing existing encryption systems that do not currently support exceptional access. Furthermore, the obligations imposed by exceptional access legislation could diminish investment in the Canadian technology sector. As legislation would apply only to providers operating in Canada, many securityconscious users would adopt purely foreign encryption systems.68 Canadi- an operations would become less profitable, and some providers might pull out of Canada altogether rather than bear the burdens of compliance. Smaller start-up firms could also suffer, potentially chilling technological innovation.69 The availability of foreign and open-source alternatives would also limit the effectiveness of any exceptional access regime.70 It would not be difficult for sophisticated users, including ones with malicious intent, to find methods of encrypting information immune to exceptional access.71 Police would still face situations in which encrypted information is inaccessible to them. Lastly, and most importantly, exceptional access would expose legitimate, socially-productive uses of encryption to the same vulnerabilities that enable lawful police access. As mentioned, there is an overwhelming consensus among information security experts that exceptional access cannot keep backdoors out of the hands of bad actors.72 Exceptional access requires some organization to hold the access keys. This is problematic, as a single organization that holds multiple keys presents a concentrated target for attackers seeking to access those keys.73

Mitigates - Government surveillance backlash impedes intelligence gathering.

Klein ‘16 [Adam Klein; Gates Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security; 12-12-2016; "Surveillance Policy"; Center for a New American Security; https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/surveillance-policy; accessed 10-21-2025] leon

While the leaks by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden violated the law and harmed ongoing intelligence-gathering efforts, they also represented a watershed moment in the debate over government surveillance in the digital age. The leaks revealed that the scale of government data collection – even lawful, court-approved data collection – was orders of magnitude greater than most Americans had believed. And the leaks created the impression around the world (fostered in some cases by imprecise media reports) that the United States was indiscriminately collecting the personal data of ordinary people. Three years after the leaks, their effects continue to reverberate across the policy landscape. The post-Snowden backlash has impeded law enforcement and intelligence gathering, harmed the U.S. technology industry’s competitiveness in international markets, and created diplomatic friction with important allies. Most importantly, many Americans remain skeptical that their government respects their digital privacy. Since 2013, the executive branch and Congress have attempted to repair the damage by making important reforms to surveillance practices and legal authorities. These include: President Obama’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, many of whose recommendations have become law or policy, and whose balanced, thoughtful report remains an important touchstone for surveillance policy. Presidential Policy Directive 28 (PPD-28), which, most notably, required U.S. signals-intelligence (SIGINT) practices to consider the privacy interests of non-Americans overseas – a commitment still unequaled by any other country. The USA Freedom Act, which ended the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ telephone call records and adopted a number of important, but underappreciated, measures to enhance transparency in government surveillance. The intelligence community’s unprecedented efforts to explain its work, and the robust legal and compliance regime under which it operates, directly to the American people. The emergence of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) as a visible, energetic, public-facing, and credible independent evaluator of key surveillance programs. While these changes are a strong beginning, they cannot be the end, for several reasons. They are not widely known overseas; indeed, given the technical and bureaucratic nature of many of the changes, they are unknown even to most Americans. The post-Snowden focus on collection of Americans’ personal data, while understandable, overshadowed other important issues, such as outreach to foreign publics and the challenges facing the U.S. technology sector. Finally, these successes are fragile. New leaks could rekindle latent skepticism and mistrust. Some changes, such as PPD-28 and the intelligence community’s transparency efforts, could be rolled back by a new president or altered by new legislation. For these reasons, surveillance reform should be seen as a work in progress rather than a finished product. The agenda we propose would take the next step toward rebuilding trust with the American people, the technology industry, and partners and publics abroad. It would enable the new administration to speak with one voice in support of a pragmatic, privacy-enhancing agenda. It would make clear to foreign populations that their countries and the United States share basic values on data privacy and surveillance. It would safeguard the United States’ enviable position as the world leader in information technology. It would help inoculate the new administration against the risk of future unauthorized disclosures. And it would further these goals while preserving needed national security capabilities. Six Principles for Pragmatic Surveillance Policy Six basic premises underlie our pragmatic approach to surveillance policy: The next president and Congress should take meaningful steps both to enhance Americans’ digital privacy and to reassure the American people that government surveillance is consistent with American values and the rule of law. Protection from unwarranted government intrusion into personal privacy is a bedrock element of American liberty. But greater transparency about surveillance practices is also needed to shore up public faith in government institutions. When the public learns that government surveillance practices dramatically outstrip what laws and the statements of government officials would lead a reasonable observer to believe, it erodes faith in governing institutions, with corrosive and dangerous long-term effects for U.S. democracy. A thriving, world-leading American technology industry is in the United States’ economic interest. It also benefits U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism efforts. Millions of American jobs rely on the information-technology industry, and tech is a vital and growing export sector. But the benefits of technological pre-eminence are not economic alone: U.S. law enforcement, counterterrorism, and intelligence efforts also benefit from the fact that much of the world’s data is stored on U.S. soil and much of the world’s internet traffic passes through the United States. Unfortunately, in the wake of the Snowden revelations, other governments have begun taking regulatory steps to align the storage and transfer of their citizens’ data with physical borders. Below, we recommend various steps to help slow or reverse this trend. Signals-intelligence collection and analysis are vital national security tools. The United States will and should continue to maintain world-leading SIGINT capabilities. Dramatically curtailing the government’s electronic surveillance capabilities is neither prudent from a national security perspective nor politically realistic. No president could responsibly surrender vital, lawful national security capabilities at a time of serious threat to the nation. Improving public and foreign trust on surveillance and digital-privacy issues is an important goal, but no reform agenda can dispel completely the aftereffects of the Snowden leaks. The heightened skepticism and expectation of transparency that the Snowden leaks created will not simply disappear. Rather, they are features of the new landscape, and policymakers and the intelligence community will have to acknowledge and adapt to them. The oft-employed metaphor of “balance” between civil liberties and security is a poor guide for optimizing surveillance policy. In a time of diverse national security threats, Americans will demand robust counterterrorism, law enforcement, and intelligence capabilities to secure the homeland. They will also insist on safeguards for personal privacy and fidelity to the rule of law. The answer is not to choose between security or liberty but to work toward both. A focus on zero-sum tradeoffs between privacy and security deters security officials from embracing a privacy-enhancing reform agenda and assumes incorrectly that surrendering some amount of one value automatically yields a concomitant benefit for the other. Signals intelligence and the powers of the NSA are not neatly severable from other issues affecting domestic and international data privacy. In practice, issues that experts would consider only loosely related to signals intelligence – such as debates over iPhone encryption and whether the government needs a warrant to read Americans’ email – powerfully influence Americans’ willingness to entrust the government with collecting, monitoring, and analyzing communications and user data. A pragmatic surveillance-policy agenda must not artificially exclude other data-privacy issues that are highly salient to the public and where constructive reform is possible. The Case for Pragmatic Surveillance Reform The next administration has an opportunity to refresh the narrative surrounding the U.S. government’s approach to surveillance and digital privacy – if it acts proactively. But this opportunity is perishable. As the new president’s term unfolds, other controversies and crises will inevitably arise, making it far harder for the administration to dictate the policy agenda. And reforms undertaken reactively after a crisis tend to garner less public goodwill than those enacted before a crisis occurs. Some might argue in favor of a bold, controversial surveillance-policy agenda – whether reformist (such as allowing the FISA Amendments Act to sunset) or security-driven (such as pushing aggressively for decryption legislation). Yet either course would be both impracticable and inadvisable for a new administration. The new president’s first actions, if divisive, will consume the president’s political capital and harden political opposition. In addition, the public will hold the new administration responsible for any terrorist attacks that occur on its watch. By contrast, the agenda we outline below would expand the new president’s political capital, earn public support and bipartisan credibility, and to some extent inoculate the president against a backlash should there be future unauthorized disclosures.