If made a law, smartphones sold in the state will need to be equipped with unbreakable encryption.
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Cooper’s bill, titled “Human Trafficking Evidentiary Access”, mirrors a similar, terrorism-focused bill introduced in NY earlier this month. The bill would, except as provided, subject a seller or lessor that knowingly failed to comply with that requirement to a civil penalty of $2,500 for each smartphone sold or leased. California based Google is in the same boat with Nexus devices running Android 5.0 or higher, and other Android models with Android 6.0 running the show. Neither Google nor Apple has made a comment on the Assembly Bill 1681 as yet.
A new anti-trafficking bill introduced in the California legislature could require that all smartphones be capable of decryption and unlocking by the phone’s manufacturer or its operating system provider, essentially overriding the user’s passcode. Although many in the USA government believe that encryption hinders law enforcement investigations, Apple and Google argue that it’s a matter of user privacy. The company’s CEO Tim Cook recently questioned President Obama’s stance on privacy and surveillance, and he has commented on various pieces of anti-encryption legislation in the United Kingdom and United States in the past.
As the argument over smartphone encryption continues on between device manufacturers like Apple, devoted to strong encryption, and USA federal government officials pushing for backdoors to access data, several states have gotten involved in the fray.
At least in the case of New York’s bill, the senate’s new website comes with a set of virtual voting buttons, which give state residents the ability to register their views on a bill with “aye” or “nay” buttons.
Called bill 1681, the proposed law was put forward by California assembly member Jim Cooper, who wants any smartphone sold in California after July 1, 2015 to be “capable of being decrypted and unlocked by its manufacturer or its operating system provider”.
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The bill must pass the assembly and the state senate, and be signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown (D).
