Proposed State Bans on Phone Encryption Make Zero Sense:

Last week, a California state legislator introduced a bill that would ban the retail sale of smartphones with that full-disk encryption feature—a security measure designed to ensure that no one can decrypt and read your phone’s contents except you. The bill is the second piece of state-level legislation to propose that sort of smartphone crypto ban, following a similar New York state assembly proposal that was first floated last year and re-introduced earlier this month. Both bills are intended to ensure that law enforcement can access the phones of criminals or victims when their devices are seized as evidence.

Those two proposed crypto bans have put another twist in an already tangled debate: The privacy and cryptography community has long opposed any such “backdoor” scenario that gives cops access to encrypted smartphones at the risk of weakening every device’s data protections. But legal and technical experts argue that even if a national ban on fully encrypted smartphones were a reasonable privacy sacrifice for the sake of law enforcement, a state-level ban wouldn’t be.