Republican presidential hopeful Rand Paul tangled with a top Obama administration official Wednesday on the matter of protecting data privacy through encryption.<\/p>\n
The Kentucky senator questioned Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson on the bulk collection of phone records, and argued that consumers\u2019 desire for encryption is a response to government surveillance.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe real culprit is government,\u201d Paul said during a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ve been so overzealous vacuuming up our records without a legitimate warrant \u2026 [Encryption] is a response to a government that didn\u2019t have a real sense of decency toward privacy.\u201d
\nPaul also criticized the government for surveillance during the civil rights era, which he described as a cautionary tale.<\/p>\n
\u201cLook at the time the government wasn\u2019t so good. The FBI director recently pointed back and talked about the times that Martin Luther King was spied upon. That\u2019s why we want these procedural protections,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Johnson, who has been making the rounds in tech circles arguing against full encryption, declined to weigh in on bulk data collection but urged Congress to act.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m in favor of a balanced solution to the [encryption] problem,\u201d he said, adding that encrypting records makes it harder to conduct criminal investigations. \u201cI think it\u2019s something we need to address.\u201d<\/p>\n
Johnson spoke to a major cybersecurity conference in San Francisco last week, where his stance on encryption was ridiculed by tech experts. \u201cI wasn\u2019t real popular for doing that,\u201d he said of his speech.<\/p>\n