With a high-profile court decision declaring the NSA’s reading of the Patriot Act illegal, pundits and politicians alike are scrambling to see the fate of the act will be at the end of the month. It’d be best if they let it die.

Photo Credit: Ervins Strauhmanis  cc
Photo Credit: Ervins Strauhmanis cc

After years of bulk data collecting, the NSA has little public evidence of the good it did, and plenty of sinking approval ratings to show the harm. Now as Silicon Valley giants join together with other concerned parties to ask President Obama not to mandate backdoors to encryption in American technology, the writing seems to be on the wall: the modern privacy backdrop has no room for loopholes.

The letter comes as many cell phone companies have announced measures to create encryption so secure it’s reportedly beyond the reach of law enforcement. Though that has drawn the ire and proposed action of law enforcement officials, which has led over 140 companies, computer science professors, open-Internet advocates, human-rights organizations, data scientists, and privacy groups to ask the President in this letter to oppose any potential legislative action that would have “U.S. companies deliberately weaken the security of their products.” They continue:

Strong encryption is the cornerstone of the modern information economy’s security. Encryption protects billions of people every day against countless threats—be they street criminals trying to steal our phones and laptops, computer criminals trying to defraud us, corporate spies trying to obtain our companies’ most valuable trade secrets, repressive governments trying to stifle dissent, or foreign intelligence agencies trying to compromise our and our allies’ most sensitive national security secrets.

Encryption thereby protects us from innumerable criminal and national security threats. This protection would be undermined by the mandatory insertion of any new vulnerabilities into encrypted devices and services. Whether you call them “front doors” or “back doors”, introducing intentional vulnerabilities into secure products for the government’s use will make those products less secure against other attackers. Every computer security expert that has spoken publicly on this issue agrees on this point, including the government’s own experts.

The letter continues to note that these encryption holes would be a threat to the country’s economic security, as well as undermine the human rights and information security around the globe.

Law enforcement officials, however, feel differently. They insist that locking out FBI and the Justice Department from access to mobile devices is the real threat to public safety, with FBI Director James B. Comey throwing out statements about protecting innocent people and marketing products that place people beyond the reach of the law.

The problem with that argument is that it supposes that law enforcement officials have no way to access this information, which isn’t true. The immense amount of data that users generate is still there, it just wouldn’t be available to federal agencies and other law enforcement with unhindered access; they would just need to use one of the many legal avenues they have, like a warrant.

The truth is the landscape around unfettered digital access has changed in this post-Snowden era. Laptops are not searchable at border crossings like handbags are, and supporters and arguments in favor of the NSA’s bulk collection of records are falling like dominoes in the weeks leading up to the expiration of the Patriot Act (which, apparently, was wrongly said to authorize the NSA’s strategy in the first place). Additionally, both the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board and the President’s own review board have not been able find an example of a terrorist act halted by Section 215 in the decade since its inception.

In the meantime, there’s a very compelling case to be made for better encryption of phones: with the liability shift coming later this year bringing more pervasive EMV availability, it’s likely that Apple and Google will see (an even greater rate of) increased adoption of mobile payment. As digital wallets become more and more popular, they’ll need excellent encryption to keep the material safe—as well as a remote wipe for any lost or stolen phone, which the Justice Department also opposed on similar grounds.

The introduction of a loop hole for law enforcement would, as the above letter notes, introduce a similar backdoor for foreign governments and hackers to also exploit, and with the Obama administration putting increased focus on cybersecurity it would be two steps backward to back any sort of legislation like this.

So far any attempts to re-pass the Patriot Act unchanged have been unsuccessful, which is a good sign. But the fact that tech companies even have to come out and ask the government to stop insisting on a backdoor shows it isn’t enough.