From Lucy Steigerwald at antiwar.com:
On September 16, The Washington Post reported that the Obama administration may be looking for a détente in the encryption wars. For proof, they offered a leaked draft of a National Security Council paper which said that Obama should not support a law mandating a decryption backdoor in tech devices.
This bodes very well. For months, federal law enforcement has been in a tizzy over the prospect of automatic encryption in Apple and Android devices. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director James Comey said that it would benefit pedophiles. Other national security officials echoed these melodramatic sentiments. Later, UK Prime Minister David Cameron came out against unbreakable encryption. Recently GOP candidate Jeb Bush said that “evildoers” would use this enhanced privacy for…doing evil.
Apple seems to be leading this new “you can’t stop us” charge, since it began with last year’s announcement that their IOS8 would make Apple itself unable to comply with certain law enforcement requests. Previously, users could choose to encrypt their devices, but making it all automatic means someone would have to opt out of these privacy measures. This could set a fantastic precedent for privacy. Now a user need not have the tech savvy of an Edward Snowden in order to have their data secret. It will be automatic. It will be an easily purchasable commodity, even in this era of Smartphones.
The US government is currently in a fight with Microsoft, who fought a warrant in a drug investigation because their servers are in Ireland, not the States. Microsoft argues that this precedent does not bode well for dissidents in more authoritarian countries, in which governments might try to force tech companies to reveal identifying information. Strong encryption, as the NSC paper notes, would in many ways lead to increased trust in the US, and certainly in US companies. The Post sums it up: that the NSC thinks that letting Apple and the other companies have their automatic encryption “would counter the narrative that the United States is seeking to expand its surveillance capability at the expense of cybersecurity.”
Official sentiment – barring that of law enforcement – seems to be going a little more in this direction. If Obama really does back off of support for a law, and Congress is unlikely to actually get one together, privacy may simply win by default. Companies move faster than bureaucracy, and they are getting more scrappy since Snowden.
To continue reading: Are We Getting Somewhere on Tech Privacy?
