You are joined by those from the ngo community, industry and capitol hill. Perhaps this is the first time so many stakeholders have a lawful access conversation have been in one place. I am especially thankful to be joined by two good friends from abroad, our staunchest allies, peter didnt, administer for home affairs and the home secretary of the united kingdom. I think each of you for accepting my invitation to be here. Our nations face a constellation of Common Security concerns but we dont face them alone. We have always stood shoulder to shoulder in the fight for freedom, peace and security and we will continue to do so. Just last night, freddie and i on behalf of our government signed the first ever agreement under the cloud act which became law last year thanks to industry support, bipartisan congressional action and the president s leadership, that act greatly facilitates criminal investigations by allowing Law Enforcement from each country to obtain evidence directly from each others commercial providers pursuant to Legal Process that safeguards privacy rights. The theme of todays unless, is distinct from the cloud act but the act is worth mentioning at the outset because it serves as an excellent example of how much we can achieve when all stakeholders come together in pursuit of a common goal. To address the lawful access issue, it will take that kind of commitment along with an honest public discussion. As individuals and as a nation we have become dependent on a vast digital infrastructure. That in turn has made us vulnerable to cybercriminals and foreign adversaries that target that infrastructure. Encryption provides enormous benefits to society by enabling secure communications, data storage and online transactions. As the federal government, we welcome these improvements to privacy and security and will work to preserve and strengthen them but the Digital World has proven such a boon in many ways, has also empowered criminals. Like everybody else criminals of all stripes increasingly rely on wireless communications, handheld devices and the internet. In todays world evidence of crime is increasingly digital evidence. As we work to secure our data and communications from hackers we must recognize our citizens face a far broader away of threats. Hackers are a danger but so are violent criminals, human traffickers, fraudsters and sexual predators. While we should not hesitate to deploy encryption, to protect ourselves from cybercriminals this should not be done in a way that he this rate societys ability to defend itself against other types of criminal threats. Making our Virtual World more secure should not come at the expense of making us more vulnerable in the real world. Enjoyment of all our personal rights, all the rights we cherish, to life, liberty, property, speech or privacy, ultimately depends upon our ability to maintain a safe society. Whether you agree with john locke about everything, he was certainly right about that. The founding document of our republic, the constitution, states that the outset that one of the principal reasons we have framed our body politic is to provide justice security resident states, to provide for the common defense, that is security from foreign enemies and to ensure domestic tranquility, that is protection from predators within society. Ideas a whole has the ability to preserve this peace and security. Our rights ultimately become meaningless. The essence of political thinking is how to reconcile the claims of the individual with the interests of the broader community. In all the great countries represented here on stage we have erected strong protections around our individual rights. There are none stronger in the world. At the same time we have placed some constraints on them where necessary to protect the safety of society as a whole. Apart from life itself, liberty is our greatest value and yet limits are placed even on this core right when necessary to protect the safety of society. We deprive people of their liberty, we arrest them, we take them into custody when we have probable cause to believe they have committed or engaged in a crime. If we could wave a magic wand and conjure up some technology that would enhance all our liberty individually, by absolutely insulating every individual from being physically hindered, preventing any possibility of arrest, would we want to deploy this technology . Bright protect the innocent but it would also insulate all criminals from being arrested. What is happening here is some Companies Want to say to the individual we can make you invisible to Law Enforcement. But do we want to live in a society where everyone is invisible to Law Enforcement . These considerations apply to privacy. That wright has never been absolute. The Fourth Amendment strikes a balance between the individual citizens interest, in conducting certain affairs in private and the general publics interest in subjecting possible criminal activity to investigation. It does so on the one hand by securing for each individual a private enclave around his persons house, papers and effects, a zone bounded by the individuals own reasonable expectations of privacy and as long as an individual acts with and that zone of privacy his activities are shielded from unreasonable government investigation. On the other hand the Fourth Amendment establishes that under certain circumstances the public has a legitimate need to gain access to an individuals zone of privacy in pursuit of Public Safety and defines the terms under which the government obtains that access. When the government has probable cause to believe evidence of a crime is within the individual zone of privacy the government is entitled to search for and seize that evidence in the search usually must be preceded by a judicial determination that probable cause exists and be authorized by a warrant. As you heard this morning some Companies Want to deploy end to end encryption on Consumer Products that would completely prevent Law Enforcement from gaining access to data or Communications Even when there is probable cause. Essentially this would establish privacy as an absolute right without regard to the safety or impact on society as a whole. It is hard to overstate how perilous this is. By enabling dangerous criminals to cloak their communications and activities behind an essentially impenetrable digital shield the deployment of warrant proven corruption is already imposing huge costs on society. It is not just the reprehensible behavior of sexual predation on children but myriad additional forms of serious crimes enabled by end to end encryption. This technology is quickly extinguishing our ability to detect and prevent a wide range of criminal activity from terrorism to largescale Drug Trafficking to financial fraud to Human Trafficking to transnational gang activity. The plot is thickening. One for the point about the cost imposed on society by warrant proof encryption, it is not just about the crimes that could have been avoided or the criminals that escape punishment. Converting the internet and communication platforms into a free zone. A law free zone and thus giving criminals the means to operate free of any lawful scrutiny will inevitably propel and expansion of criminal activity. If you remove any possibility that the cops are going to be watching a neighborhood, the criminals already in the neighborhood will commit a lot more crimes. Let me address some of the canards that are floating around in this discussion. First it is claimed that Law Enforcement is asking to impinge on privacy. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are not seeking to move the goalposts at all. We are seeking to preserve the degree of privacy to which we have always been entitled under our constitution. It is not a degree of privacy that is absolute and impervious under all circumstances. It is a right to privacy that allows for lawful access when society can demonstrate a sufficiently compelling need. In this regard i was amused to see the impassioned statement of a leading Digital Rights activist to 2 days ago. It said a secured messenger platform should provide the same amount of privacy as you have in your living room. Thats right. We agree. That is exactly what Law Enforcement is seeking and as you should all know with a warrant, Law Enforcement can get access to your living room both physically and virtually where there is probable cause to do so. It is also said the government is seeking some secret backdoor to all data and communications. That sounds very nefarious but it is false. We are seeking a front door. We would be happy if the Companies Providing the encryption keep the keys. What we are asking is some responsible party have the keys so that when we demonstrate a lawful basis, probable cause that crimes are being committed, we can gain access to that evidence. It also seems to me the argument of companies that want to deploy want proof encryption rests on an unsustainable premise. The companies seem to think the debate is over once they show that their technology will achieve some incremental increase in privacy regardless of the impact on the welfare of society but our whole history shows that the extent of the rights has always depended on a balance between the claims of the individual and those of society. Think of it this way. In the hierarchy of rights and values, the right to life is at the top. There are many technologies available that could provide more security for my personal right to life. I would be much safer cruising down the highway in an m1 tank but the risks that would be invariably posed to all other drivers would be too great. Optimizing the value of one value only is not the end of the inquiry. The externalities of achieving that isolated goal at all costs are just unacceptably high. The heart of the matter is this. The security advantages of warrant proof encryption offered to the individual outweigh the risks posed to the public by the same technology, this is not a decision for the companies to make themselves. At a decision for society to make. The public can enjoy the benefits of encryption while still allowing for lawful access. There is no doubt we all benefit from encryption. It allows for ecommerce and many other online applications but those are not the applications we are talking about. We are not talking about consumer interactions with Online Enterprises like banks or retailers. Law enforcement with a warrant and obtain the information that we seek and we are not talking about encryption for Enterprises LikePower Companies or banks that they used to detect their operations. What we are concerned about is consumer to consumer communications, and data storage. The argument is made that to achieve perfect protection against bad actors it is essential to override societys interests in retaining access to evidence. Some hold this view dogmatically claiming it is technologically impossible to provide lawful access without weakening security against unlawful access but in the world of cybersecurity we do not deal with absolute guarantees but in relative risks. All systems fall short of optimality and have some residual risk of vulnerability. A point which the Tech Community acknowledges when they propose that Law Enforcement can satisfy our requirements by exploiting vulnerabilities in their products. The real question is whether the residual risk resulting from incorporating a lawful access mechanism is materially greater than those already in the unmodified product and the department does not believe that can be demonstrated. We are confident that there are Technical Solutions that allow lawful access without materially weakening what is provided by encryption. Such encryption regimes already exist. To that point the Tech Community regularly implements new features that slightly affect the potency of encryption and other security protocols and it is profitable and those features benefit consumers. They design products to allow Software Updates using centrally managed security keys. Even if allowing for lawful access resulted in theory, in a slight risk differential, its significance should not be judged solely by the fact that it falls short of the theoretical optimality or perfect protection, platonic ideal. The significance of any incremental risk should be assessed based on its practical effect on Consumer Security as well as its relation to the net risks the product poses for society. With socially injurious ways mitigating the risk. If one already has an effective level of security by way of illustration against 99 of threats is it reasonable to incur massive further costs to move closer to optimality and obtain a 95 level of protection where the risks is extremely remote. A company of shareholders would not allow the company to incur the costs of imposing that change and society should not allow companies to inflict those costs on society itself. We must make the choices based on the net benefit to society. Of the choice is between a world where we can attain 99 insurance against cyberthreats for the typical consumer while still providing Law Enforcement, 80 of the axis it needs to protect society or a world where we boosted cybersecurity to 99. 5 at a cost of reducing Law Enforcement access 20 the choice for society should be clear. I want to make a point about freedom and our privacy. Throttling the ability of Law Enforcement to protect and interdict criminal actors does not advance either privacy or freedom. Ultimately there are two ways of protecting society, either detect and neutralize the bad guys or regiment society as a whole. Anyone who has gone through a security line in an airport, removing your shoes or belts, having your clothes spewed out on the table, toiletries, for all to see, knows firsthand that regimentation places a burden on our privacy rights. The curfew concept, when i was first attorney general 28 years ago, there was a lot of violence in our urban areas much of and deuced by gang activity. There were two approaches. Some empowered their police to identify and neutralize gangs and get them off the streets. Others adopted the regimentation approach, the curfew. Everybody was kept off the streets. Not the bad guys, everybody. Those are two approaches to protecting society. More so than ever, the principal tool we have in Law Enforcement to identify and neutralize the criminals is to listen to and read their communications. There is no substitute. If we lose the ability to conduct electronic surveillance, we inevitably are driven to greater and greater regimentation of society to secure ourselves. We will lose our liberty and privacy and that is an extremely high price to pay if we prioritize impenetrable encryption above all else. I do wish to give credit where credit is due. Some Tech Companies have taken significant steps to detect and report criminality. When it comes to preventing crime we hope industry will continue to be an ally, not an adversary. We hope the power of technology will provide greater safety to the public, not place us at greater risk of harm and exploitation. We think the tech sector has the ingenuity to develop effective ways to provide secure encryption while providing secure legal access and it is well past time for some in the Tech Community to abandon the indefensible posture that a technical solution is not worth exploring and instead turn their talent and ingenuity to developing products that will reconcile good cybersecurity to the imperative of Public Safety and national security. As microsoft bill gates has observed, no question of ability but a question of willingness. Obviously the department would like to engage with the private sector in exploring solutions. The time to achieve that may be limited. As this debate has dragged on and deployment of inclusion has accelerated, our ability to protect the public from criminal threats is rapidly deteriorat