As the FBI's top lawyer, Jim Baker once butted heads with Apple Inc. and CEO Tim Cook over the tech giant's refusal to help law enforcement unlock the San Bernardino, California, shooter's iPhone. Now, three years later, Baker has done an apparent about-face—he's espousing strong encryption as being vital to national security. 

Baker wrote earlier this week in a blog post for Lawfare that he's had time to reflect and make "efforts to embrace reality with respect to some aspects of several interrelated subject areas that have comprised a substantial part of my career: national security, cybersecurity, counterintelligence, surveillance, encryption and China.

"In the face of congressional inaction, and in light of the magnitude of the threat, it is time for governmental authorities—including law enforcement—to embrace encryption because it is one of the few mechanisms that the United States and its allies can use to more effectively protect themselves from existential cybersecurity threats, particularly from China," he added. "This is true even though encryption will impose costs on society, especially victims of other types of crime."  

Baker was the FBI's top lawyer from 2014 until late 2017. He left the bureau last May and now serves as director of national security and cybersecurity for the R Street Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, public policy research organization based in Washington, D.C. He's also a CNN legal analyst and lecturer at Harvard Law School. 

He said in an interview Thursday that he spent about 10 months working on the blog post, but the "thinking process began years ago as I learned more and more about Huawei and what they were doing," referring to the Chinese telecom giant and its 5G mobile network. 

"A few people have emailed me. The feedback has been positive so far," he added. "I have not heard from friends in law enforcement yet. I will be eager to hear their reaction."

In his blog post, Baker asserts that he still "stands by his work" in the FBI's conflict with Apple over encryption in 2016, which ended when the government found a way to unlock the shooter's phone without Apple's assistance. 

But he argues that the solution in the San Bernardino case is "inadequate to address the larger going-dark encryption problem," which pits the interests of law enforcement against privacy and cybersecurity advocates. Going dark refers to using encryption to cloak data. 

Baker asserts that the U.S. must face the reality of operating in a "zero-trust interconnected world," where encryption will be one of the ways to protect sensitive data transmitted through networks and devices that might be compromised. 

Describing the security threat that China poses to the U.S. as "profound," Baker urged law enforcement officials to "become among the strongest supporters of widely available strong encryption." 

He acknowledged that his message might "be a bitter pill for some in law enforcement and other public safety fields to swallow, and many people will reject it outright. It may make some of my former colleagues angry at me. I expect that some will say that I'm simply joining others who have left the government and switched sides on encryption to curry favor with the tech sector in order to get a job. That is wrong."

Baker concludes by saying that he "found it painful to write this piece, especially since I worked for so many years in the Justice Department and the FBI on the going dark problem without ever finding a viable solution. I have no choice but to admit that I failed in that regard.

"But we all need to deal with reality," he adds.