From the readings and in your opiniong, should technology companies implement backdoors in their products for the benefit of the government? Are companies like Apple ethically responsible for protecting the privacy of their users or are they ethically responsible for helping to prevent violent or harmful activities that their platforms may enable? How are these two conflicting goals to be balanced in a world of free-flowing communication and extreme terrorism?
If you are against government backdoors, how do you response to concerns of national security? Isn’t save lives or protecting our nation worth a little less individual privacy. How do you counter the argument: If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear?
The argument to unlock the iPhone in the San Bernardino case is clever. The FBI requested a very narrow court order, asking Apple to modify iOS and install the modified software on one specific device. According to the request, Apple doesn’t need to directly crack the code; and aside from the one copy Apple provides the FBI, they could and should keep the software from being released in public.
This seems reasonable enough, and many people believe the FBI, supported by the White House, is requiring this software to protect our safety, to fight an honorable cause, so they think Apple should comply, creating this backdoor to Make America Great. But by asking for this new software with the backdoor, invoking the 1789 All Writs Act, the FBI is effectively compelling Apple to become an extension of law enforcement, simply because the suspect is using software developed by Apple. If it becomes court precedent, it has looming dangerous consequences—because of the ubiquity of software today, any technology company could fall prey to it. In any future case that involves a locked iPhone or an encrypted Gmail inbox, this precedent may apply. “Do we want to accept that courts may compel any software developer, any technology manufacturer, to become a forensic investigator for the government[?]”
Technology companies are ethical in assisting law enforcement by providing data, but such help shouldn’t require compromising their own systems, or undermining the premise of their business.
Furthermore, it’s important to realize that America doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and Apple is not solely an American company. It’s an international affair—other governments in the world, including Russia and China, could require Apple to hand over the same user data to assist their law enforcement, just as the U.S. government could. When the group owning the backdoor has a different interest than our own, how should we respond? When China has access to backdoors to devices owned by American citizens through Lenovo and Huawei, why is the U.S. government, the same group that demanded new “American” backdoors, justified in harshly criticizing those “Chinese” backdoors? Using the same counter-terrorism argument, the Chinese government has passed a law requiring foreign firms to provide secret keys to decrypt data—why is this Chinese law different?
I’m deeply disappointed by the aforementioned Chinese law, and now I’m troubled to imagine the same practice happening all around the world. As a non-American citizen, my direct interest isn’t involved in the San Bernardino case—I can’t find any document regulating American intelligence groups’ spying on me, and it’s been debated whether I have the full set of constitutional rights that American citizens have (although the debate is usually around undocumented immigrants). But if we allow the U.S. government to access this backdoor, it’s easy to imagine that other governments would want the same level of access. It’s terrifying to imagine a world, where I’m subject to the same level of surveillance wherever I go.
The same could be said for any American citizen. In an attempt to make the U.S. safer by weakening Apple’s encryption system, the FBI is in fact handing a vulnerability to everyone interested in undermining the safety of the U.S., “weaken[ing] the privacy of all Americans.”
In general, handing personal data to the government is dangerous, no matter which government is in question. We protect our privacy not because we have secrets to hide from the government, but because we shouldn’t trust the government in the first place. By giving out our data, we become much more vulnerable to intentional or unintentional data leaks, organized governmental wrongdoing, etc.
By giving up data, we’re giving up control.
Conundrum 