Why the US government is questioning WhatsApp’s encryption
On December 2nd, 2015, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik
opened fire on the city of San Bernardino, California, leaving 14 people, and
the two shooters, dead. During the investigation the FBI obtained Farook’s
iPhone, but could not access it through the passcode. They went Apple to unlock
it, and Apple couldn’t help.
The iPhone’s encryption methods were so secure, according to
Apple, that Apple itself couldn’t access the data on the phone. As a result,
the U.S. government wanted Apple to purposefully weaken the encryption of its
iPhones, putting a “backdoor” in the iOS framework that would allow the FBI to
access the contents of iPhones everywhere. But this would also leave the
operating system much more vulnerable to hackers and other governments.
The battle over online privacy has been waging on since the
popularization of the internet itself. These discussions with Apple in
particular have brought privacy activists and law enforcement head to head,
fighting over who can utilize the privacy provided by encryption and what they
can use that encryption for.
Messaging apps like Signal, WhatsApp and iMessage are
encrypted. That means the messages are kept private from everyone except the
intended recipient. And while these platforms are far from perfect – Jeff
Bezos’ phone was recently accessed through a malicious video message via
WhatsApp – many people rely on the privacy encryption provides daily.
Esra’a Al Shafei, for example, built a social platform
called Ahwaa where individuals who identify as LGBTQ+ can virtually meet and talk
with each other in Middle Eastern and North African countries such as Egypt,
where homosexuality is not expressly illegal, but where the government has used
laws against what they call debauchery, among others, to criminalize LGBTQ+
individuals.
Al Shafei says that, if encryption were to be forcibly
weakened, she would have to shut down the platform. She said, “the Internet as
a whole will lose so many voices, so many communities, so many narratives, so
many perspectives.“
Michael Daniel, President and CEO of Cyber Threat Alliance
and former Cybersecurity Coordinator on the National Security Council Staff
under Barack Obama, says that “there are situations where we would want the
government to be able to get access to certain information.” For Michael, it’s
important to make a distinction between information that should remain
encrypted, like bank data and health data, and information that might be
beneficial to make available to law enforcement, like text message.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation disagrees. “I don’t think
it’s appropriate for the government to decide that they get security and we
don’t,” says Cindy Cohn, Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation. Amnesty International agreed with this sentiment in an open letter
to Facebook, urging the company to stay strong on its decision to implement
end-to-end encryption on its messaging platforms, saying “there is no middle ground:
if law enforcement is allowed to circumvent encryption, then anybody can.“
The debate continues, and is likely to continue, until a
compromise can be made. Whether that will ever happen has yet to be seen.
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