Security vs Privacy; Apple (en andere grote spelers) vs de FBI

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In the Apple Case, a Debate Over Data Hits Home

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WASHINGTON — Three years ago, reeling from Edward J. Snowden’s disclosure of the government’s vast surveillance programs and uncertain how to respond, President Obama said he welcomed a vigorous public debate about the wrenching trade-offs between safeguarding personal privacy and tracking down potential terrorists.

“It’s healthy for our democracy,” he told reporters at the time. “I think it’s a sign of maturity.”

But the national debate touched off this winter by the confrontation between the Justice Department and Apple over smartphone security is not exactly the one Mr. Obama had in mind.

Mr. Snowden’s revelations produced modest changes and a heightened suspicion of the government’s activities in cyberspace. Because the issue now centers on a device most Americans carry in their pockets, it is concrete and personal in a way that surveillance by the National Security Agency never was.


The trade-offs seem particularly stark because they have been framed around a simple question: Should Apple help the F.B.I. hack into an iPhone used by a gunman in the massacre last December in San Bernardino, Calif.?

Law enforcement officials have been adamant they must be able to monitor the communications of criminals. They received a vote of confidence from Mr. Obama on Friday, when he said the “absolutist” position taken by companies like Apple is wrong. But the pushback has been enormous.

In the month since a judge ordered Apple to comply with the F.B.I., the debate has jumped from the tech blogs to the front pages of daily newspapers and nightly newscasts. Supporters of the company’s position have held rallies nationwide. Late-night comedians have lampooned government snoopers. Timothy D. Cook, the usually publicity-shy Apple chief executive, pleaded his case on “60 Minutes” last December. On Twitter, “#encryption” fills the screen with impassioned debate on both sides.

“Discussing the case with my friends has become a touchy subject,” said Matthew Montoya, 19, a computer science major at the University of Texas, El Paso. “We’re a political bunch with views from all across the spectrum.”

Like many of her friends, Emi Kane, a community organizer in Oakland, Calif., recently found herself arguing via Facebook with a family friend about the case. Ms. Kane thought Apple was right to refuse to hack the phone; her friend, a waitress in Delaware, said she was disgusted by Apple’s lack of patriotism.

After exchanging several terse messages, they agreed to disagree. “It was a hard conversation,” Ms. Kane said.

The novelist Russell Banks, who signed a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch on behalf of Apple, said he had spoken with more than a dozen people about the case just in the last week.

“It’s not just people in the tech industry talking about this,” Mr. Banks, the author of “Affliction” and “The Sweet Hereafter,” said. “It’s citizens like myself.”

That may be because the Apple case involves a device whose least interesting feature is the phone itself. It is a minicomputer stuffed with every detail of a person’s life: photos of children, credit card purchases, texts with spouses (and nonspouses), and records of physical movements.

Mr. Obama warned Friday against “fetishizing our phones above every other value.” After avoiding taking a position for months, he finally came down on the side of law enforcement, saying that using technology to prevent legal searches of smartphones was the equivalent of preventing the police from searching a house for evidence of child pornography.

“That can’t be the right answer,” he said at the South by Southwest festival in Texas, even as he professed deep appreciation for civil liberties and predicted both sides would find a way to cooperate. “I’m confident this is something that we can solve.”

But polls suggest the public is nowhere near as certain as Mr. Obama. In surveys, Americans are deeply divided about the legal struggle between the government and one of the nation’s most iconic companies. The polls show that Americans remain anxious about both the threat of terrorist attacks and the possible theft of personal digital information.

A Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey released last week found that 42 percent of Americans believed Apple should cooperate with law enforcement officials to help them gain access to the locked phone, while 47 percent said Apple should not cooperate. Asked to weigh the need to monitor terrorists against the threat of violating privacy rights, the country was almost equally split, the survey found.

That finding may have seemed unlikely in the wake of terrorist attacks last year in Paris and San Bernardino. In December, eight in 10 people said in a New York Times/CBS News survey that it was somewhat or very likely that there would be a terrorist attack in the United States in the coming months. A CNN poll the same month found that 45 percent of Americans were somewhat or very worried that they or someone in their family would become a victim of terrorism.

But despite the fears about terrorism, the public’s concern about digital privacy is nearly universal. A Pew Research poll in 2014 found more than 90 percent of those surveyed felt that consumers had lost control over how their personal information was collected and used by companies.

The Apple case already seems to have garnered more public attention than the Snowden revelations about “metadata collection” and programs with code names like Prism and XKeyscore. The comedian John Oliver once mocked average Americans for failing to know whether Mr. Snowden was the WikiLeaks guy or the former N.S.A. contractor (he was the latter).


Now, people are beginning to understand that their smartphones are just the beginning. Smart televisions, Google cars, Nest thermostats and web-enabled Barbie dolls are next. The resolution of the legal fight between Apple and the government may help decide whether the information in those devices is really private, or whether the F.B.I. and the N.S.A. are entering a golden age of surveillance in which they have far more data available than they could have imagined 20 years ago.

“It’s an in-your-face proposition for lots more Americans than the Snowden revelation was,” said Lee Rainie, director of Internet, science and technology research at Pew Research Center.

Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said: “Everyone gets at a really visceral level that you have a lot of really personal stuff on this device and if it gets stolen it’s really bad. They know that the same forces that work at trying to get access to sensitive stuff in the cloud are also at work attacking the phones.”

For the F.B.I. and local law enforcement agencies, the fight has become a high-stakes struggle to prevent what James B. Comey, the bureau’s director, calls “warrant-free zones” where criminals can hide evidence out of reach of the authorities.

Officials had hoped the Apple case involving a terrorist’s iPhone would rally the public behind what they see as the need to have some access to information on smartphones. But many in the administration have begun to suspect that the F.B.I. and the Justice Department may have made a major strategic error by pushing the case into the public consciousness.

Many senior officials say an open conflict between Silicon Valley and Washington is exactly what they have been trying to avoid, especially when the Pentagon and intelligence agencies are trying to woo technology companies to come back into the government’s fold, and join the fight against the Islamic State. But it appears it is too late to confine the discussion to the back rooms in Washington or Silicon Valley.

The fact that Apple is a major consumer company “takes the debate out of a very narrow environment — the universe of technologists and policy wonks — into the realm of consumers where barriers like the specific language of Washington or the technology industry begins to fall away,” said Malkia Cyril, the executive director of the Center for Media Justice, a grass-roots activist network.

That organization and other activist groups like Black Lives Matter have seized on the issue as important for their members. In February the civil liberties group Fight for the Future organized the day of protest against the government order that resulted in rallies in cities nationwide.

“When we heard the news and made a call for nationwide rallies, one happened in San Francisco that same day,” said Tiffiniy Cheng, co-founder of Fight for the Future. “Things like that almost never happen.”

Ms. Cyril says the public angst about the iPhone case feels more urgent than did the discussion about government surveillance three years ago.

“This is one of those moments that defines what’s next,” she said. “Will technology companies protect the privacy of their users or will they do work for the U.S. government? You can’t do both.”

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Before We Even Know The Details, Politicians Rush To Blame Encryption For Brussels Attacks

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You may remember that, right after the Paris attacks late last year, politicians rushed in to demonize encryption as the culprit, and to demand backdooring encryption before the blood was even dry. Of course, it later turned out that there was no evidence that they used encryption at all, but rather it appears that they communicated by unencrypted means. Just yesterday, we noted that the press was still insisting encryption was used, and using the lack of any evidence as evidence for the fact they must have used encryption (hint: that's not how encryption works...).

So, it should hardly be a surprise that following this morning's tragic attacks in Brussels that have left dozens dead and many more injured, that encryption haters, based on absolutely nothing, have rushed in to attack encryption again. The first up was Rep. Adam Schiff, who quickly insisted that he had no actual facts on the matter, but we should be concerned about encryption:

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Op dinsdag 22 maart 2016 22:29 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Israeli firm helping FBI to open encrypted iPhone: report | Reuters

TEL AVIV Israel's Cellebrite, a provider of mobile forensic software, is helping the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation's attempt to unlock an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino, California shooters, the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reported on Wednesday.

If Cellebrite succeeds, then the FBI will no longer need the help of Apple Inc (AAPL.O), the Israeli daily said, citing unnamed industry sources.

Cellebrite officials declined to comment on the matter.

Apple is engaged in a legal battle with the U.S. Justice Department over a judge's order that it write new software to disable passcode protection on the iPhone used by the shooter.

The two sides were set to face off in court on Tuesday, but on Monday a federal judge agreed to the government's request to postpone the hearing after U.S. prosecutors said a "third party" had presented a possible method for opening an encrypted iPhone.

The development could bring an abrupt end to the high-stakes legal showdown which has become a lightning rod for a broader debate on data privacy in the United States.

Cellebrite, a subsidiary of Japan's Sun Corp (6736.T), has its revenue split between two businesses: a forensics system used by law enforcement, military and intelligence that retrieves data hidden inside mobile devices and technology for mobile retailers.

(Reporting by Tova Cohen; Editing by Elaine Hardcastle)


Bron: www.reuters.com

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American Tech Giants Face Fight in Europe Over Encrypted Data

ROME — Silicon Valley’s battle over encryption is heading to Europe.

In the United States, the F.B.I.’s demands that Apple help “unlock” an iPhone used by a mass killer in California opened a heated debate on privacy. After recent attacks on the Continent, like the bombings in Brussels last week and the wave of violence in Paris last November, governments across the European Union are increasingly pushing for greater access to people’s digital lives.

This week, French lawmakers are expected to debate proposals to toughen laws, giving intelligence services greater power to get access to personal data.

The battle has pitted Europe’s fears about the potential for further attacks against concerns from Apple and other American technology giants like Google and Facebook that weakening encryption technologies may create so-called back doors to people’s digital information that could be misused by European law enforcement officials, or even intelligence agencies of unfriendly countries.

The recent attacks have pushed many Europeans to favor greater powers for law enforcement over privacy., But opponents say such measures should not undermine the region’s tough data protection rules that enshrine privacy on par with other rights like freedom of expression.

This balance between national security and privacy has put major countries in the region on opposite sides of the debate, with Germany and the Netherlands dismissing new encryption laws being considered by Britain and France.

“Fundamental rights are just that, fundamental,” said Nico van Eijk, a data protection expert at the University of Amsterdam. “Of course, there are exceptions for national security reasons. But governments have to be pragmatic.”

That pragmatism has led to a series of new proposals across Europe that, if approved, would give national intelligence agencies renewed powers to compel the likes of Apple, Google and Facebook to hand over encrypted information.
Continue reading the main story
The Apple-F.B.I. Case

F.B.I. Clash With Apple Loosed a Torrent of Possible Ways to Hack an iPhone
MAR 23
Apple Policy on Bugs May Explain Why Hackers Would Help F.B.I.
MAR 22
Apple May Be Willing to Risk Contempt Charge
MAR 21
Apple and Justice Dept. Prepare to Face Off in Court
MAR 21
Apple vs. the F.B.I.: How the Case Could Play Out
MAR 20

See More »
Related Coverage

F.B.I. Clash With Apple Loosed a Torrent of Possible Ways to Hack an iPhone MARCH 23, 2016
Apple Policy on Bugs May Explain Why Hackers Would Help F.B.I. MARCH 22, 2016
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Privacy and the iPhone MARCH 19, 2016
Explaining Apple’s Fight With the F.B.I. FEB. 17, 2016

In Britain, lawmakers are completing legislation that could force tech companies to bypass encryption protections in the name of national security. The law — called a “Snooper’s Charter” by opponents — may compel companies to aid the country’s law enforcement agencies by hacking people’s smartphones and computers, among other powers.

And on Tuesday, French politicians will debate proposals to update the country’s antiterrorism laws that may hand tech executives prison sentences of up to five years, as well as fines to their companies of around $390,000, if they refuse to provide encrypted information to the country’s investigators.

Amendments to the French law — itself a response to the attacks in November — may still pass without the encryption proposals, which are opposed by France’s left-wing government.

But politicians and industry executives say Apple’fight with the F.B.I. has focused a spotlight on how companies’ efforts to protect users’ messages and other data have made it increasingly difficult for European intelligence agencies to obtain such information.

“When we’re able to recover a cellphone, but authorities have no way of accessing its data, it obviously cripples the work of our surveillance agencies,” said Philippe Goujon, a French politician behind the recent encryption proposals.

“Sure, this could have repercussions internationally,” he added. “But there are other countries in the world that have similar legislation.”

Europe’s attempts to get access to encrypted data have not gone unchallenged by Apple.

Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has, for instance, met with a string of European politicians, including France’s prime minister, Manuel Valls, and Britain’s home secretary, Theresa May, in recent months to lobby for tough encryption technology.

And to show that the company is trying to be cooperative, Apple’s executives have also provided unencrypted information, including so-called metadata on people’s phone calls and GPS coordinates, as part of terrorism investigations in Europe, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

Such efforts, in part, have paid off with some European governments that remain skeptical of plans to weaken companies’ encryption technology in the name of national security.

Germany, which has some of the world’s toughest privacy rules, has balked at the proposals being considered by Britain and France, while the Dutch government published an open letter this year expressly stating its opposition to back doors in encryption services provided by the likes of Apple.

Such loopholes, the Dutch government said, would “also make encrypted files vulnerable to criminals, terrorists and foreign intelligence services.”

As pressure in parts of Europe mounts over access to encrypted data, industry watchers say attention is expected to focus on Britain — a top international market for most American tech companies — where expanded powers for the country’s intelligence services are likely to come into force by the end of the year. The legislation is the brainchild of the ruling Conservative Party, which has a sufficient parliamentary majority to enact the regulatory changes.

Under the proposals, the Investigatory Powers Bill would force Internet and telecommunications companies to hold records of websites visited by people in Britain over the last 12 months. It also would provide the country’s intelligence agencies with a legal mandate for the bulk collection of large quantities of data, while allowing them to hack individual devices under certain situations.

Ms. May, Britain’s home secretary, told lawmakers this year that such powers were required to defend the country’s security. She added that the legislation offered sufficient transparency and oversight about how British spies conducted their activities to calm people’s privacy concerns.

But for Apple and other Silicon Valley companies, the proposed legislation also includes new powers that can permit the British government to demand that companies remove encryption protections where “reasonably practicable” to gain access to digital communications.

The British government stresses that such rules would not undermine companies’ services because they may not apply to so-called end-to-end encryption, a technology used by the likes of Apple’s iMessage and FaceTime services, as well as Facebook’s WhatsApp Internet messenger.

But in a series of appeals to the British Parliament, several American tech giants, including Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo, have complained the proposals could force them to create backdoor access for the country’s spies, or face falling afoul of the new national security rules.

“A key left under the doormat would not just be there for the good guys,” Apple wrote in its recent evidence to British lawmakers. “The bad guys would find it, too.”

Such concerns, say security experts, could be compounded if other national governments — either in Europe or farther afield — followed Britain’s lead by passing similar legislation.

“If these encryption plans go through, then who’s to stop France or other countries asking for the same thing?” said Ross Anderson, a professor of security engineering at the University of Cambridge who co-wrote a paper with other experts last year that criticized American and British governments’ plans to weaken encryption. “When you give one country backdoor access, where do you stop?”

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EFF Sues for Secret Court Orders Requiring Tech Companies to Decrypt Users’ Communications

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San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a Freedom of Information (FOIA) lawsuit today against the Justice Department to shed light on whether the government has ever used secret court orders to force technology companies to decrypt their customers’ private communications, a practice that could undermine the safety and security of devices used by millions of people.

The lawsuit argues that the DOJ must disclose if the government has ever sought or obtained an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) requiring third parties—like Apple or Google—to provide technical assistance to carry out surveillance.

The suit separately alleges that the agency has failed to turn over other significant FISC opinions that must be declassified as part of surveillance reforms that Congress enacted with the USA FREEDOM Act.

EFF filed its FOIA requests in October and March amid increasing government pressure on technology companies to provide access to customers’ devices and encrypted communications for investigations. Although the FBI has sought orders from public federal courts to create a backdoor to an iPhone, it is unclear to what extent the government has sought or obtained similar orders from the FISC. The FISC operates mostly in secret and grants nearly every government surveillance request it receives.

The FBI’s controversial attempt to force Apple to build a special backdoor to an iPhone after the San Bernardino attacks underscored EFF’s concerns that the government is threatening the security of millions of people who use these devices daily. Many citizens, technologists and companies expressed similar outrage and concern over the FBI’s actions.

Given the public concern regarding government efforts to force private companies to make their customers less secure, EFF wants to know whether similar efforts are happening in secret before the FISC. There is good reason to think so. News outlets have reported that the government has sought FISC orders and opinions requiring companies to turn over source code so that federal agents can find and exploit security vulnerabilities for surveillance purposes.

Whether done in public or in secret, forcing companies to weaken or break encryption or create backdoors to devices undermines the safety and security of millions of people whose laptops and smartphones contain deeply personal, private information, said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Nate Cardozo.

“If the government is obtaining FISC orders to force a company to build backdoors or decrypt their users’ communications, the public has a right to know about those secret demands to compromise people’s phones and computers,” said Cardozo. “The government should not be able to conscript private companies into weakening the security of these devices, particularly via secret court orders.”

In addition to concerns about secret orders for technical assistance, the lawsuit is also necessary to force the government to comply with the USA FREEDOM Act, said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Mark Rumold. Transparency provisions of the law require FISC decisions that contain significant or novel legal interpretations to be declassified and made public. However, the government has argued that USA FREEDOM only applies to significant FISC decisions written after the law was passed.

“Even setting aside the existence of technical assistance orders, there’s no question that other, significant FISC opinions remain hidden from the public. The government’s narrow interpretation of its transparency obligations under USA FREEDOM is inconsistent with the language of the statute and Congress’ intent,’’ said Rumold. “Congress wanted to bring an end to secret surveillance law, so it required that all significant FISC opinions be declassified and released. Our lawsuit seeks to hold DOJ accountable to the law.”

For the full complaint:
https://www.eff.org/document/fisc-foia-complaint