Michele Thanos, the former director of the National Security Agency who was fired in February after she disclosed that she had access to the agency’s highly classified intelligence, said that the new administration may be ready to “step up efforts to take on the encryption debate.”

“There will be more steps that the White House takes to advance and enhance the dialogue,” said Thanos, an assistant professor of media and public affairs at the University of Maryland who is an expert on cybersecurity issues. “Certainly one of the first things they did was to provide a number of recommendations for law-enforcement agencies and intelligence agencies to work on encryption. In some ways, the NSA could be the first to act after the new administration changes.”

Encryption is a complex protocol in which secret codes are transmitted using a process called symmetric encryption that is considered especially robust and secure when used by the Internet’s major Internet companies, such Yahoo! and Google.

Those companies, as well as their customers, have all been the focus of criticism from government agencies that believe the companies’ encryption can be used by terrorists and spies to prevent the monitoring of their communications.

Trump’s new cybersecurity adviser has called for the government to use its resources more effectively in the fight with encryption, and he has vowed to repeal the 2015 National Security Agency surveillance rule mandating that companies produce backdoors into their products.

The new NSA director, the same person who was fired after she said she knew about information that the agency had accessed from Yahoo, will have to decide whether to use that information to target encrypted communications — or whether to send them out directly.

The Obama administration required companies that provide the government with direct access to their encryption code to build backdoors into their products, though the law did not require them to give it to the government, and so companies could opt out.

Under new White House direction, the Obama administration has sought to have the issue of encryption raised at every U.S. intelligence gathering gathering event since February, in what will be a more formal role for government and industry officials now that former FBI Director James Comey has been replaced by his own underling.

The new policy would, for the first time, require government agencies to share information with tech companies about encrypted communications, a step the Obama administration had rejected until Wednesday.

Obama officials had said that it was likely that the Trump administration would take that same approach, but White House press secretary Sean