Spencer Schneier
        Staff Writer

Technology has become a fundamental aspect of the country’s society and culture. Smartphones are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, and the Internet is being integrated into everything from cars to light bulbs.

This fact makes it crucially important for policymakers to have an understanding of technology, but unfortunately, essentially everyone on both sides of the aisle lacks an understanding of the basic elements of how this core element of the U.S. society functions.

The initial reaction of many in response to this point is that politicians do not need to understand the technology because it is not their job to do so. This point is dangerously false.

One shocking example of the lack of understanding politicians have is the current “debate” around end-to-end encryption.

The tech industry argues that it is necessary, but the government continually insists (with the aid of the media) that end-to-end encryption enables terrorism and that it must be broken down.

The government’s claim is at best murky, and at worst, an outright lie with the true intention of carrying out mass surveillance internationally, but regardless of this, the impact is cut and dry.

Functionally, end-to-end encryption means that a message is secured in such a way that the only people who can view its contents are the sender and the recipient of the message. This is the standard for Apple’s iMessages, for example, and tech industry considers it to be the safest means of securing data.

The government believes that this standard must be broken down because they are unable to view the contents of the messages that are sent in this fashion, which of course prevents bulk collection and surveillance practices. The government claims it is a national security threat and that the necessary solution is to include “backdoors” or as they’re called in the tech industry, vulnerabilities.

What policymakers do not understand — and by policymakers I am referencing everyone from congress, to Barack Obama and Donald Trump — is that a backdoor is not some secret thing that only the U.S. could access.

It would be vulnerable to anyone who wants to enter, and that would mean a massive liability for anyone using software that has these built-in “backdoors.” A skilled hacker, or a malicious entity such as the Chinese government, could easily access these backdoors, which would be a very unfortunate event for many who could have sensitive data stolen.

To compare it to something simple, imagine if the government felt as though its citizens’ homes were too difficult to enter without a warrant and wanted to make it easier to access their homes so that it can conduct searches for whatever it is they need to look for.

The equivalent, in this scenario, to what is being proposed for the tech industry would be to force every construction company to build a permanently unlocked door into the side of every house. The government would argue that the door is out of sight and only those who know about it could utilize it, except it is obvious that any capable burglar could case the house and enter through that door.

When politicians are faced with this question, they tend to respond that the U.S. has so much tech talent that all we have to do is sit a bunch of them down in a room and come up with a magical solution!

Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination, nonsensically said that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates should be consulted to help inform his tech policy.

Hillary Clinton recently responded to a question on end-to-end encryption by saying, “I just think there’s got to be a way, and I would hope that our tech companies would work with government to figure that out.”

Interestingly, as an anecdotal example, Clinton, Trump and even “electable” Marco Rubio all fail to even have sections on cybersecurity on their campaign websites.

The intelligence community has been saying for years that cybersecurity is the top risk that the U.S. faces, yet none of the likely winners of the 2016 candidates have even taken the time to include a section on what policy they might include involving cybersecurity.

The closest any of the three get to mentioning it is when Hillary opines this on her campaign website, under the “National Security” section: “Cyber attacks have profound consequences for our economy and our national security. Hillary will leverage the work of the public and private sectors — overcoming the mistrust that impedes cooperation today — to strengthen security and build resiliency for economy and infrastructure. Our country will outpace this rapidly changing threat, maintain strong protections against unwarranted government or corporate surveillance, and ensure American companies are the most competitive in the world.”

So in one subsection of her website, she mentions it for one paragraph and essentially provides nothing. She states the problem, and then just says she will fix it and then moves on.

In the past year, the cybersecurity industry saw everything from airplanes to massive government databases breached by hackers, and this is all with heavy encryption practices in place.

When deploying top technology and paying close attention to security, as the private sector does much more than the government, it is difficult to prevent cyber attacks from occurring.

If we begin to break that down because we don’t understand the implications, the potential effects could be devastating.

The internet has become ubiquitous, and it will only continue to become more so. With connected cars, smart-homes and essentially every bit of information about us online, the last thing we can do as a society is begin to break down the security that protects that information.

The only way people could view this as a good idea is if they were unaware of what they were advocating.

The potential implications of breaking down security standards in the name of national security could lead to something far worse than the thing it is looking to protect: a collapse of the power grid, or a shock to the financial system, both would be achievable for a malicious entity that could enter through backdoors.

It’s time for policymakers to step up and understand the issues that they are talking about, or it is time for them to step away and let those who do handle these pressing issues. Unfortunately, their history of doing just that is not very promising.