Robert Litt, general counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, lamented that companies have moved ahead with encryption designed to keep the U.S. government out of their customers' data, saying the feds are open to working with businesses on security issues.

A “middle ground” should exist between full encryption and none at all that could provide privacy to U.S. citizens while giving the government access to data for lawful law enforcement purposes, Litt said on Wednesday in a speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. His remarks came less than a year after Apple Inc. and Google Inc. made encryption standard on their mobile operating systems following fears about U.S. government surveillance prompted by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden's leaks.

Under the encryption Apple and Google offers, the companies cannot help authorities get data stored on their customers' phones or tablets even if they receive a warrant for the information. Law enforcement can secure a warrant to seize a mobile device and try to decrypt it, privacy lawyers have said. But the encryption could prove too strong for the authorities to break, and the law on forcing the owner of a device to decrypt data is unsettled.