Roger Fingas
Keynoting a cybercrime conference on Thursday, U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein attacked the encryption stances of companies like Apple while simultaneously arguing for the importance of security.
"We need to place security on the same footing as novelty and convenience, and design technology accordingly," said Rosenstein, quoted by Politico's Eric Geller. Shortly thereafter, however, Rosentein claimed that "we cannot accept a culture in which technology companies considers it part of their responsibility to defeat legitimate law enforcement."
Intentionally or not the comment implicated Apple, which holds a strict privacy stance in which encryption is central. iPhones and iPads, for example, have been protected with full-disk encryption since iOS 8, putting the company in a perpetual race with data recovery and forensics teams. Both FaceTime and iMessage conversations use end-to-end encryption, making them impossible to intercept midstream, even by Apple.
Services like WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram also use end-to-end encryption, which law enforcement and spy agencies have complained are sometimes being used by terrorists and other criminals. People like former FBI director James Comey have complained about communications "going dark" to legitimate law enforcement requests.
Apple has maintained that it's impossible to build a backdoor into its platforms without fundamentally weakening security, exposing people to hackers and mass surveillance. The company infamously fought with the U.S. Department of Justice over the iPhone 5c of San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook, only for the DoJ to abandon the case when the FBI succeeded with a third-party forensics solution.
The federal government has been slowly working towards privacy legislation in the face of scandals like Equifax and Cambridge Analytica. Apple CEO Tim Cook has suggested "it's inevitable that there will be some level of regulation," and even supported the cause, for example praising the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation.
Charles Martin
Christine McKee
Wesley Hilliard
Malcolm Owen
Andrew Orr
William Gallagher
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52 Comments
Defeating law enforcement is only a side-effect of doing the right thing, not their motivation. These "leaders" are clueless and feel victimized.
Who remembers the "secure" version of Netscape Navigator that needed to be purchased? Anything that supported a certain level of encryption was considered a threat to US National Security.
The government has the legal right to enter your house and search every inch of it with a warrant but Apple's Cook says even with a legal warrant we will do everything in our power to stop the government from searching someone's stupid mobile phone?????? So if someone invents a "new technology house" that includes encrypted locks and a system that will destroy all the contents of said house unless you know the right password to enter it that's ok too??? For some reason people today feel that their phones are some how special and above the laws of this and other countries. I personally would much rather have the police search my phone than my entire house, car, ect. Hell the police can even get a warrant to search someone bank safely deposit box! But someone's iPhone is off limits. People keep saying their phone is personal so it's different. So your home, car, ect isn't personal?
Quite the interesting comment from such a whipped, milquetoast DAG.