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 The move marks the latest foray into an ongoing debate over
encryption between Silicon Valley and Washington. While tech
companies generally oppose weakened security standards, federal
authorities have warned about a "going dark" phenomenon in which
criminal suspects use powerful encryption in their communications so
that investigators cannot access a phone's content, even with a
warrant.
The ENCRYPT Act, sponsored by Democratic Representative Ted Lieu and
Republican Blake Farenthold, would prevent any state or locality
from mandating that a “manufacturer, developer, seller, or provider”
design or alter the security of a product so it can be decrypted or
surveilled by authorities, according to bill text viewed by Reuters.
 The legislation is in response to proposals in recent months in New
York and California that would require companies to be able to
decrypt their smartphones manufactured after 2017, Lieu said.
"It is completely technologically unworkable for individual states
to mandate different encryption standards in consumer products,"
Lieu told Reuters in an interview. "Apple can't make a different
smartphone for California and New York and the rest of the country."
It is unclear how much momentum the bill will have in the House,
though the chamber has staked out positions sympathetic to digital
privacy in recent years.
Encryption has been an area of disagreement between tech companies
and law enforcement authorities for decades, but it gained renewed
scrutiny after Apple and Google began offering strong encryption by
default on their products in 2014.
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FBI Director James Comey told a Senate panel on Tuesday that federal
investigators have still been unable to access the contents of a
cellphone belonging to one of the killers in the Dec. 2 shootings in
San Bernardino, California, because of encryption.
But technology companies, privacy advocates and cryptographers say
any mandated vulnerability would expose data to hackers and
jeopardize the overall integrity of the Internet.
A study from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard
University released last month, citing some current and former
intelligence officials, concluded that fears about encryption are
overstated in part because new technologies have given investigators
unprecedented means to track suspects.
(Editing by Richard Cowan and Matthew Lewis)
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