Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Florida Rejects Controversial Encryption Backdoor Bill

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | May 13, 2025

Legislators in the US state of Florida have shot down a bid to introduce a law that would have mandated encryption backdoors.

The outcome of the effort – known as SB 868: Social Media Use by Minors – means that the backdoors would have allowed encryption to be weakened in this fundamental way affecting all platforms where minors might choose to open an account.

As the fear-mongering campaign against encryption is being reiterated over and over again, it’s worth repeating – there is no known way of undermining encryption for any one category of users, without leaving the entire internet open and at the mercy of anything from government spies, to plain criminals.

And that affects both people’s communications and transactions.

Not to mention that while framing such radical proposals as needed for a declaratively equally large goal to achieve – the safety of youth online – in reality, by shuttering encryption, young people and everyone else are negatively affected.

If anything, it would make everyone online less secure, and, by nature of the world –  young people more so than others.

And so, Florida’s Senate on announced that SB 868 is now “indefinitely postponed and withdrawn from consideration.”

The idea behind the proposal was to allow law enforcement access to communications on a social platform – by forcing a company to build in backdoors any time law enforcement came up either with a warrant – or merely a subpoena.

The focus of the bill was “ephemeral” messages – as in, preventing those defined as minors from using the associated features. At the same time, their parents or guardians would have “full access” to their online activities.

“Dangerous and dumb” – is how the digital rights groups Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) earlier summed up and alliterated the proposal.

The US, and its individual states, are not the only ones attempting to create a chink in the armor of global online security by repeatedly attacking online encryption.

Thus far, cooler heads seem to be prevailing, but the battle is far from over, as this fundamental piece of online security continues to be in the crosshairs of, most of the time, authorities hungry for ever-easier ways to conduct ever more invasive mass surveillance.

More: UK’s iCloud Encryption Crackdown Explained: Your Questions Answered on Apple’s Decision and How it Affects You

May 14, 2025 - Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , ,

No comments yet.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.