FBI vs. Apple

No amount of access to your thoughts, movements, or acquaintances will ever be enough to satisfy the inevitable authoritarian interests of law enforcement.  The latest manifestation of this struggle is the FBI’s attempt to force Apple into government service as a government spy.

No government should be allowed to force companies to become tools of government surveillance.  If the FBI gets its wish, there will be a long list of repressive regimes lined up to demand backdoor access to encrypted communications.  This is not just a matter for private communications, but is also a matter of security for nations, and businesses. 

Our government law enforcement agencies (federal, state, and local) can access more information about your behavior and movements and communications than at any time in history.  But in the minds of many in law enforcement, it is not enough.  

The government is seeking unprecedented authority, with huge implications.  It’s not about one phone, it’s about every phone, around the world.  Creating back doors to computer encryption opens up security holes that can be exploited by any and all governments, and private criminals.

In this case (FBI vs. Apple), as in many, the government is presenting a false choice between privacy and security.  Law enforcement has a wide array of tools to investigate and prosecute terrorist incidents.

Does law enforcement have a legitimate right and interest in obtaining otherwise private information when there is warranted probable cause?  Of course.  No one denies this.  Do all governments overreach at times and conduct themselves in ways that are illegal, unwarranted, and unnecessary?  Of course.  That is also undeniable established history, and requires only a little knowledge of the past and present and some rudimentary understanding about human behavior in groups and organizations, and the inevitable incentives and disincentives that arise where there is authority and power.  Fortunately, in the U.S. we have a constitution and amendments that guarantee certain protections against unwarranted government intrusion in our lives.  The existence of that constitution, and the amendments, and the statutes that ostensibly protect people from unwarranted government power and intrusion do not, by themselves, guarantee protection of privacy.  There always has, and always will be, an adversarial relationship between the right to privacy and government interest in accessing personal information.  This is not a struggle only for the past, or the present, or the future.  It is always and forever ongoing.

Our knowledge of the extent of government overreach in these matters is largely due to the actions of whistleblowers and activists who have exposed  government programs.  We only learned about the FBI’s illegal surveillance of Americans (COINTELPRO) from 1956-1971 after some citizens broke into an FBI office in 1971.  This interesting bit of history has been well documented in books and documentaries.  This type of government paranoia and surveillance is not, historically, that exceptional.  In the 1970’s, reforms were put in place in response to the Church Committee’s 1976 findings that the FBI and CIA had conducted domestic spying on lawful political activities.  Many of these reforms were rolled back after 9/11.

Technology has made your life more transparent than it ever was in the past.  Your use of ATMs, credit cards, and cell phone towers are tracked, and can be acquired by law enforcement under certain conditions.  Our license plates are photographed and stored by a variety of agencies, and can be correlated with geographic data. This “ambient” street-level surveillance is all around us.  Many of your movements in public are captured by video recorders.  Phone records of all the phone numbers you connect to can be subpoenaed.  We leave a trail of movements and communications that can be accessed by law enforcement.

The Bush administration admitted that the FBI and CIA had received several warnings that Al Qaeda network members were taking flight lessons and had plans to hijack commercial airplanes in the U.S.  The government admitted that its failure to act on these warnings was not due to a lack of law enforcement powers or authority.  The failure resulted from an overload of information, a lack of translators, and failures of cooperation and coordination between intelligence agencies.  Providing law enforcement with wider lattitude to permit monitoring and collecting information from individuals not suspected of criminal activity creates more information overload, and too much time and money wasted on false leads.

We should resist the efforts of any and all governments (foreign and domestic) to force tech companies to create backdoors to our private, personal and business data.  Strong encryption makes us a safer and more prosperous nation, even if government agencies cannot read or hear everything you have ever said or thought.