With all the chaos, confusion and conflict consuming the halls of government right now, you’d be forgiven for missing reports that the U.S. attorney general and a group of U.S. senators are backing a new bill that would crack open the secure spaces where you keep your deepest, darkest secrets.

Secrets like your favorite muffin recipe, your Whats- App chat with your overseas girlfriend, your happy-hour Zoom meet-up and your iPhone camera roll.

Or your calls with your attorney, your nuclear research notes or your recordings of illegal political scheming or domestic abuse.

What makes protecting these secrets, all secrets, possible is encryption: encoding and decoding information to protect it while it’s in storage or in transit.

Once the mysterious domain of cryptographers and computer scientists, encryption is now drearily common. Your connections to most websites are encrypted by default. Messages sent between iPhones are encrypted. By law, all credit card information must be encrypted by the stores and businesses that use it. And when you use a password, you are often providing the key to unscrambling and accessing information.

Widespread encryption means more privacy and more security. Alas, it protects both good people and bad people.

The innocuously named Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act might sound like a good idea. Why wouldn’t we want to allow law enforcement access to information that can help them solve crimes? There have been more than a few headlines that highlight where a locked phone or scrambled file has kept police or the FBI from digging deeper into a criminal conspiracy or even a terrorist threat.

And the proposed law makes clear that a search warrant, signed by a judge, would be needed to demand that a tech company or product maker unlock a file or device. In a perfect world, existing checks and balances would ensure that this new power would be used only for good, wouldn’t be abused and wouldn’t be aimed at innocent civilians.

Too bad we don’t live in a perfect world.

There would obviously be potential for bad actors in law enforcement or government to use their surveillance powers out of malice, greed or mere curiosity. There are more than a few examples of this problem already.

But even putting those aside, the larger problem is this: It is not possible to build a door that only good people can use.

Encryption is a solid, proven science involving math that would make your head spin. There are encryption schemes that would take centuries of grinding by supercomputers to break. The only way you could guarantee “lawful access” to encrypted data is to build in a back door.

Imagine that there was a magic key that could open every lock. Of course, this key would be heavily guarded and rarely used. Unfortunately, the fact that it exists means that it’s possible a copy could be made, either by getting access to the original or simply trial and error over time.

And when we’re talking about digital keys, a magic key can be copied and distributed endlessly. It wouldn’t be long before every digital lock is useless. A magic key for encryption is a massively bad idea.

A magic key that works only for U.S. technology is an even worse idea, as the rest of the world would still have ready access to cutting-edge encryption for everything from bank accounts to smartwatches. In that world, would you use an American service or device? Would any person or business?

Any tool can be used for good or evil. The U.S. Constitution and our civil liberties protect the innocent as well as the guilty.

The debate over encryption is not one of personal privacy versus national security. It’s liberty versus control. And liberty is what defines our country.

Ryan Ozawa is communications director for local tech company Hawaii Information Service and publisher of the HawaiiStories.com digital literary journal.