Harvard study says that encryption may not protect criminals as much as law enforcement authorities argue

A study published recently by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University shows that encryption may not protect criminals as much as law enforcement authorities argue. According to the authors, ‘the “going dark” metaphor does not fully describe the future of the government’s capacity to access the communications of suspected terrorists and criminals. The increased availability of encryption technologies certainly impedes government surveillance under certain circumstances, and in this sense, the government is losing some surveillance opportunities. However, […] the combination of technological developments and market forces is likely to fill some of these gaps and, more broadly, to ensure that the government will gain new opportunities to gather critical information from surveillance.’The study also points to the fact that ‘end-to-end encryption and other technological architectures for obscuring user data are unlikely to be adopted ubiquitously by companies’ and that ‘metadata is not encrypted, and the vast majority is likely to remain so’.