What encryption lets us do is say, "Yes, the Internet is insecure." Bad guys are able to compromise computers everywhere, but we're able to tolerate that because if they do intercept our messages, they can't do any harm with it.

As the local police department might want to decrypt a phone of a criminal suspect, so would the Chinese or the Russian or the Iranian intelligence agencies like to be able to do exactly the same thing.

What encryption lets us do is say, "Yes, the Internet is insecure." Bad guys are able to compromise computers everywhere, but we're able to tolerate that because if they do intercept our messages, they can't do any harm with it.

It may be true that encryption makes certain investigations of crime more difficult. It can close down certain investigative techniques or make it harder to get access to certain kinds of electronic evidence. But it also prevents crime by making our computers, our infrastructure, our medical records, our financial records, more robust against criminals. It prevents crime.

In order for any smartphone manufacturer to decrypt the data on your phone, it has to hold onto a secret that lets it get that access. And that secret or that database of secrets becomes an extremely valuable and useful target for intelligence agencies.

I believed then, and continue to believe now, that the benefits to our security and freedom of widely available cryptography far, far outweigh the inevitable damage that comes from its use by criminals and terrorists. I believed, and continue to believe, that the arguments against widely available cryptography, while certainly advanced by people of good will, did not hold up against the cold light of reason and were inconsistent with the most basic American values.

The people working in my field also are quite skeptical of our ability to do this. It ultimately boils down to the problem of building complex systems that are reliable and that work, and that problem has long predated the problem of access to encryption keys.