Apple’s Tim Cook speaks out on the issue of phone encryption

The ongoing encryption tug-of-war between high-tech industry and the country’s law enforcement agencies was brought to prime time television on Sunday by Tim Cook(Apple’s CEO) when he was interviewed on the CBS news program“60 minutes.”

Cook was asked by Charlie Rose about the necessity of law enforcement agencies having access to the information which has been securely encrypted on Apple’s phones. In response, Cook had this to say:“There are all kinds of sensitive information on smartphones today. You should have the ability to protect it. The only way we know how to do that is to encrypt it.” Apple

Cook added, “Apple will comply with any warrants served on it by law enforcement authorities as it’s required to do by law, but in the case of encrypted communication, we don’t have it to give.”

Law enforcement agencies have been frustrated by this inconvenient hitch. In an address at the Brookings Institute last year, FBI director James B. Comey said that the law had unfortunately not kept pace with technology, and this disconnect had created a serious public safety problem.

“We call it ‘Going Dark,’ and what it means is this: those charged with protecting our people aren’t always able to access the evidence we need to prosecute crime and prevent terrorism, even with lawful authority. We have the legal authority to intercept and access communications and information pursuant to court order, but we often lack the technical ability to do so,” Comey added. Apple

Cook, in the interview with CBS, addressed this issue raised by Comey (and consequently by other governmental security agencies) by holding that framing the encryption issue as one of either privacy or security is oversimplifying the issue. As Americans, Cook maintained that we should have both.

To add weight to the argument on the side of the high-tech industry, the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (a non-profit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world), Cindy Cohn, told TechNews that the proposal to protect our security by weakening it is going in the wrong direction.

“If the government were to suggest that no one put locks on their doors because if we were a terrorist, it would be harder to get into our house, we would think that was a bad idea. This is pretty much the digital equivalent of that,” Cohn insisted. Apple

In several public forums, Director Comey has suggested that a compromise is foreseeable on the issue of data encryption. Others are, however, less convinced about such a prospect. Cohn, for example, was not sure what this “compromise” would mean in that context. She added that

if the compromise suggested meant compromising the security of one’s encryption, then that was not a compromise at all.

Berin Szoka, on his part, insisted that there was no compromise in sight. Speaking to Tech media, he said, “This is really a binary issue. Are you going to allow end-to-end encryption by the operating system makers or not? Once you say no, you start down this road without stopping the really smart bad guys from continuing to use encryption on their devices.”

The CEO of Accellion, Yorgen Edholm, suggested that perhaps law enforcement authorities would find the sought-after compromise outside the tech sector. He maintained that encryption could always be broken by persons with supercomputers, and the government had more of them (supercomputers) than anyone else. Apple

“So the government has the resources to decrypt anything. It’s just that those resources have to be made available to local law enforcement agencies. That compromise wouldn’t make it easier for the bad guys to get into my privacy just because the government wants to have the computer equivalent of a wiretap,” he told an online journal.

In the scenario that the high-tech industry in the U.S is strong-armed into using weaker encryption, business abroad could be affected. It must not be forgotten that domestic companies have already lost millions in overseas business following Edward Snowden’s revelations about U.S. government agencies vacuuming data on the internet.

Comey, in a recent address to the Senate panel, insisted that despite the potential losses, high-tech companies should change their business model when it comes to encryption. In his speech at Brookings, he added that encryption is not just a technical feature but also a marketing pitch (for the tech companies, that is). Apple

“What he’s trying to do is distract from the fact that he’s trying to ban a technology that secures Americans’ communications every day, he’s trying to reframe the issue as one of corporate greed, which is asinine,” said Szoka as a response to remarks made by Director Comey.