Obama offers tech leaders warning on encryption
President
Barack Obama made a pilgrimage Friday to SXSW — the tech world’s Davos and
Woodstock rolled into one — making a government recruitment pitch even as he
fanned a row over encryption.
Obama traveled to Austin, Texas, ostensibly to
open a “pipeline” of programmers, developers and other tech whiz kids to enter
government service. “We need you,” Obama said, receiving a rockstar welcome
from a young and liberal crowd of 2,100.
But his charm offensive was tempered
by the ongoing disagreement between his government and tech firms over the
balance between smartphone privacy and national security. Obama’s
administration has gone to court to try and force Apple to unlock the iPhone of
one of the San Bernardino terror attackers, insisting encryption must not be
absolute. Tech firms argue that if the government has access to a “back door”
to encrypted information, all pretense of privacy would be lost.
Obama told
members of his otherwise receptive audience that they should not take an
absolutist view on privacy, and warned against “fetishizing our phones above
every other value.” “We make compromises all the time,” he said, pointing to
invasive airport security measures, police search powers and traffic stops.
“It’s an intrusion, but we think it’s the right thing to do,” he said.
“And
this notion that somehow our data is different and can be walled off from those
other tradeoffs we make, I believe, is incorrect.” The Apple case has touched
off a debate not only between industry and government, but also within Obama’s
own administration.
Parts of the military and intelligence community favor
strong encryption, which Obama acknowledged makes the debate more complicated.
But he appeared to lean toward the views of law enforcement, which is hungry to
have access to evidence when it needs it.
“There has to be some concession to
the need to be able to get into that information somehow,” he said. “If
technologically, it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system where
the encryption is so strong that there’s no key, there’s no door at all, then
how do we apprehend the child pornographer? How do we solve or disrupt a
terrorist plot?” Edward Snowden’s disclosure that the government had covertly
collected vast amounts of data had elevated people’s suspicions of government,”
Obama added. Popular culture has broadened such views with portrayals of
omnipotent spy agencies.
“There’s like half a fingerprint, and half an hour
later I’m tracking the guy in the streets of Istanbul,” Obama joked. “It turns
out it doesn’t work that way.”
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