In a joint letter to President Obama, many of the giants of the technology world including Apple, Google, Facebook, and Cisco have argued that allowing built-in backdoors to encryption products weakens everyone and endangers security for all.
The battle between the government and the tech companies is a fall out of the Edward Snowden revelations about NSA’s mass surveillance.
This letter comes out even as Congress is debating whether to extend the provisions in the Patriot Act that allow for mass collection of telephony metadata that was recently ruled as illegal by a Federal Appeals Court.
“Encryption protects billions of people every day against countless threats—be they street criminals trying to steal our phones and laptops, computer criminals trying to defraud us, corporate spies trying to obtain our companies’ most valuable trade secrets, repressive governments trying to stifle dissent, or foreign intelligence agencies trying to compromise our and our allies’ most sensitive national security secrets,” the letter to President Obama reads.
Apple, Facebook and Google have all increased the levels of encryption in their products in recent months after the Snowden revelations served as a wake up call for the tech companies.
“This protection would be undermined by the mandatory insertion of any new vulnerabilities into encrypted devices and services. Whether you call them ‘front doors’ or ‘back doors,’ introducing intentional vulnerabilities into secure products for the government’s use will make those products less secure against other attackers,” the letter to Obama continued.
The letter makes the case that introducing backdoors harms the commercial interests of American companies such as Cisco, HP and others. As customers have become aware of the risks of NSA breaking encryption and breaking into private, national, and commercial networks, customers will trust American products even less when they know that those products come with backdoors by default.
“Introducing mandatory vulnerabilities into American products would further push many customers—be they domestic or international, individual or institutional—to turn away from those compromised products and services,” the letter states. “Instead, they—and many of the bad actors whose behavior the government is hoping to impact—will simply rely on encrypted offerings from foreign providers, or avail themselves of the wide range of free and open-source encryption products that are easily available online.”
The letter was signed by more than 140 tech companies and dozens of civil liberty, human rights, and press freedom groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
It was also signed by around 60 security and policy experts including Whitfield Diffie, one of the co-inventors of the public key cryptography commonly used on the Internet today, and the former White House counter-terrorism czar Richard A. Clarke.
As the recent passage of the USA Freedom Act that mandates limits on the NSA’s bulk collection in the House of Representatives shows, lawmakers are becoming more aware and more willing to challenge various national security points of views that have become conventional wisdom without much challenge.
“The Administration faces a critical choice: will it adopt policies that foster a global digital ecosystem that is more secure, or less?” the letter asks. “That choice may well define the future of the Internet in the 21st century.”
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