US Government steps up fight on Apple and Facebook’s use of encryption – Stuff.co.nz

OPINION: The technology and privacy debate has just taken a turn for the worse, with US Senator Lindsey Graham directing some colourful threats towards Apple and Facebook during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this week.

"This time next year, if we haven't found a way that you can live with, we will impose our will on you."

"You're going to find a way to do this or we're going to go do it for you."

Those are just two of the explosive threats Graham made, referring to the two companies' use of end-to-end encryption on their platforms.

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Graham's comments followed a tone set by US Attorney General William P. Barr, who on Monday said that dealing with how big tech used encryption was one of the Justice Department's "highest priorities."

Barr claimed that cartels and child pornographers used the feature to hide their criminal activities, saying the companies' message to customers was "no matter what you do, you're completely impervious to government surveillance". "Do we want to live in a society like that? I don't think we do."

From a technical point-of-view, he's not wrong. That makes the row over encryption, from a law-maker and law-enforcement point of view, a maddening one. Big tech companies like the two mentioned above are, in some scenarios, actively (but inadvertently) preventing governments from doing their jobs as effectively as they could do.

J SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP

US Senator Lindsey Graham has warned tech companies that official action will be taken if they can't come up with a solution.

In a rare display of cross-party unity, both Democrats and Republicans argued that Apple and Facebook's use of encryption was getting in the way of justice.

Graham even went as far as to say "We're not going to live in a world where a bunch of child abusers have a safe haven to practice their craft. Period. End of discussion."

Strong stuff. But the Senator's colourful words don't tell the whole story.

End-to-end encryption isn't there to prevent justice from being served. It's just one of the unfortunate byproducts as we found out when Apple refused to grant the FBI backdoor access to the San Bernardino mass shooter's iPhone back in 2015.

Apple's message at the time was a sensible one: "Up to this point, we have done everything that is both within our power and within the law to help them. But now the US government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create. They have asked us to build a backdoor to the iPhone."

In plain English, this means Apple couldn't provide the FBI with a one-time backdoor to the shooter's iPhone. The only way Apple could deliver this, as I understand it, would be to roll out a software update to all iPhone users. That would provide the FBI with a backdoor to all iPhones.

My view on this is similar to Apple and Facebook's. Encryption is there to offer us, the user, one of our basic human rights, privacy. It's a widely-used, and pretty basic, piece of technology that allows personal messages to remain how they were intended. Personal.

Apple's user privacy manager, Erik Neuenschwander, put across an eloquent argument for encryption when he said: "We've been unable to identify any way to create a back door that would work only for the good guys."

Likewise, WhatsApp head Will Cathcart and Messenger head Stan Chudnovsky put the argument against encryption across eloquently with a written testimony that read: "The 'backdoor' access you are demanding for law enforcement would be a gift to criminals, hackers and repressive regimesThat is not something we are prepared to do."

But there was a definite lack of unity when the two tech giants offered possible solutions for the problem.

With Facebook's Sullivan suggesting that "on-device scanning" could be a viable option, Apple's Neuenschwander said, "We don't have forums for strangers to contact each other ... and our business doesn't have us scanning material of our users to build profiles of them."

What's going to happen now? Nothing. Not in the immediate future anyway. The next significant step will likely come as William Barr hopes to have his Justice Department investigations of the big tech platforms - Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple - completed next year.

Whatever is eventually decided in the US will, no doubt, have repercussions throughout the rest of the world.

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US Government steps up fight on Apple and Facebook's use of encryption - Stuff.co.nz