If the FBI has a backdoor to Facebook or Apple encryption, we are less safe
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Version 0 of 1. Fresh off news of yet another massive government data breach, the FBI is yet again trying to scare Americans into believing encryption is dangerous rather than what it actually is: one of the best ways to better protect our private information from criminal hackers. Last week, FBI official Michael B. Steinbach ignorantly told Congress that tech companies like Apple and Google should “prevent encryption above all else” since terrorists are using encrypted communications tools. (So are hundreds of millions of ordinary citizens.) Then on Monday, US officials relayed breathless assertions to the Los Angeles Times, claiming members of ISIS were now using encrypted text messaging apps to communicate, insinuating there’s an even more urgent imperative to make them illegal. “Privacy, above all other things, including safety and freedom from terrorism, is not where we want to go,” Steinbach said last week. What the FBI doesn’t seem to get – or more likely, what its officials are purposefully ignoring – is that encryption isn’t primarily about privacy. It’s about security. Encryption is something we should be encouraging all citizens, companies and our own government to be using to mitigate against everything from criminals stealing your iPhone to the many massive data breaches conducted by faceless foreign criminal operations that have made national headlines in the past year. The government knows this even if not admitting it; a classified document in the Snowden archive details how encryption is vital to security. Yet the agency is in the midst of a push to force tech companies to install backdoors in encryption, the fastest way to weaken America’s cybersecurity. FBI director Jim Comey first started making the push last year, and it has been widely ridiculed by technical experts, but the chorus inside government seems to have only gotten louder even as officials claim cyberattacks are the number one threat the nation faces. The idea that terrorists will stop using end-to-end encryption – where a message is unintelligible from when it leaves the sender until it reaches its recipient – if the US bans companies from using it is preposterous. As Johns Hopkins cryptography professor Matthew Green tweeted, “You could strangle the whole U.S. tech industry, and ISIS would *still* be able to communicate with their followers using encryption.” There are plenty of open-source encryption programs that have been around for 20 years and are too prevalent to rein in, plus the code itself is protected by the First Amendment. Forcing big companies to backdoor their products will just hurt the millions of ordinary people worldwide who depend on encryption for protection from snoopers, criminals and foreign governments. That includes tech companies’ Chinese users, who can use encryption to protect themselves from their own authoritarian government. Just weeks after the FBI unveiled its anti-encryption plans last year, China announced it too wants to pass a “counter-terrorism” law that would force companies like Apple and Google to hand over encryption keys. Without a hint of irony, the Obama administration condemned the move. Here’s how Reuters reported it in March: In an interview with Reuters, Obama said he was concerned about Beijing’s plans for a far-reaching counterterrorism law that would require technology firms to hand over encryption keys, the passcodes that help protect data, and install security “backdoors” in their systems to give Chinese authorities surveillance access. “This is something that I’ve raised directly with President Xi,” Obama said. “We have made it very clear to them that this is something they are going to have to change if they are to do business with the United States.” Read that opening paragraph again and try to explain how it’s any different than what the US is proposing. Yes, China will almost certainly use its “counter-terrorism” powers for all sorts of things beyond terrorism. But we’d be kidding ourselves if we didn’t think the US will use its own “backdoor” powers to do the exact same thing, as they’ve done over and over again with the Patriot Act in the last decade. The FBI is going to have to decide which is more important: strong cybersecurity, or the ability to read every message that’s sent all of the time. Because attempting to force backdoors into encryption compromises the safety of its own citizens and gives authoritarian powers like China and Russia an excuse to force Apple and Google and whomever to hand them the keys to the encrypted communications too. Apple CEO Tim Cook has commendably been speaking out in public on this issue, forcefully defending the use of encryption on iPhones as essential in the 21st Century. It’s time for the other tech company CEOs to step up and ask the FBI why it’s saying cyberattacks are the greatest threat we face on one hand, and then saying they want to make us all even more vulnerable to attacks on the other. |