Why the Apple-FBI Battle Made People Realize the Importance of Privacy Faster Than Snowden
End-to-end encryption just got massive! Whatsapp, the Facebook-owned messaging app, just enabled default encryption mode for all its 1 billion users and they seem to love it.
This is huge! Millions of internet users now suddenly not only talk about encryption but also started using it in their daily communication. It sounds like a privacy enthusiast’s wildest dream — to wake up to the world in which everybody uses encryption and a solid one at that.
Maybe Facebook will follow? We’ll see.
At the same time, the FBI-Apple battle seems to be over. For now. But what we’ve just witnessed is the first battle of an attrition war for laws and policies towards better cyber security at the cost of people’s privacy.
It’s also a story of double standards, where the US government applies different rules based on the size of the company they are fighting.
At one extreme stands a small tech start-up, Lavabit, humble and hopeless against Kafkaesque bureaucracy and governmental supremacy. At the other we have a tech giant that was –fortunately- approached differently by the state and was able to defend their users’ privacy in the end. This time, FBI chose not to file the order under seal as it did with Lavabit. They wanted Apple to be in the full spotlight of public opinion. But we can agree that the effect was unexpected.
Edward Snowden described the story as the “most important tech case in a decade”. He also said that the FBI had alternative methods “since the ’90s” that would allow it to access to the information from the phone.
The FBI urged Apple to create a custom operating system, citing an 18th- century law called All Writs Act, that would allow the policing agency to brute-force itself into an iPhone 5C that belonged to a San Bernardino shooter.
After 2 months, the US government has dropped its legal case against Apple claiming they have accessed the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone without Apple’s help.
The former director of the NSA and ex-chief of the CIA Michael Hayden took an interesting approach in admitting that “America is simply more secure with unbreakable, end to end encryption.”
Why Apple’s encryption case was different from Snowden’s
So, how come Apple’s privacy cause had more support from the average, non-tech users than the Snowden revelations? It’s a matter of loyalty and commercial power.
We can all agree that Snowden (a former NSA contractor) is a really smart guy who definitely doesn’t lack heroic traits. When he realized the injustice of what the NSA is doing with people’s personal data and decided to let the world know, it was at the expense of his safety and freedom- he now lives in restrained conditions, in Moscow, under the protection of Putin, not exactly a pillar of democracy. He attends streamed conferences and still has a strong voice in everything NSA, online privacy, surveillance and encryption related.
While Snowden’s story has all the makings of a Hollywood blockbuster, and an award-winning documentary on the story has been already made; people’s reactions to his world surveillance revelations have been…let’s say, anemic.
Freedom fighters along with civil rights NGO’s managed to apply some pressure on the American Government, changing a few laws such as the Act of Freedom, a bill which was meant to end the NSA program that mass collects phone records of Americans.
How is Apple different from Snowden?
First of all, Apple is almost a religion, and not just in America, but all over the world, from Japan to Romania. It has millions of fans who follow it with cult-like dedication. So when Apple is attacked, people listen and are interested in all the technical details of encryption; nobody even thinks to say “I’ve got nothing to hide”.
Even though we’ve seen David trump Goliath several times during our history, to win the war on privacy you need an army- Apple proved to have exactly that.
Tens of years of brand mastery and customer loyalty strategies confirmed their worth once again in the battle of FBI vs. Apple, stopping the authorities from breaking all the iPhones.
Apple’s winning argument:
Other tech giants such as AT&T, Airbnb, eBay, Kickstarter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Square, Twitter, Cisco, Snapchat and WhatsApp, even its longtime rivals Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft came to their defense.
What actually made Apple’s position to stand out? Highlighting and explaining the government’s incorrect understanding of the legal and technical issues involved in the case. It’s inconceivable how unprepared and untrained the government’s specialists were for this trial.
The quote which ended Apple’s deposition is so heartbreakingly true:
“Almost 90 years ago, Justice Louis Brandeis, reflecting on the ‘progress of science’ beyond wiretapping famously warned that ‘[t]he greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding’.”
The danger that lurks here is that in too many cases judges, lawyers and governmental representatives don’t understand the technical issues they are debating and they still have to decide for all of us what is right or wrong. I have to add here that the problem of surveillance versus encryption is a hard nut to crack and all the confusion around it is understandable to some point.
The unlucky ones: Lavabit case
Sometimes it really takes a tech giant to stand up to the FBI, which was not the case for Lavabit, a now-defunct secure email service which received the same abusive request back in 2013, when the mass surveillance scandal outburst.
We might say the Apple was lucky to have a public trial. That was not in the cards for Ladar Levison, the founder of Lavabit.
His case was played out in secret under seal for several months. He essentially had to fight alone against the US government, under extreme pressure and arrest threats, without any support from major tech companies or privacy supporters. He was asked to hand over the encryption keys for his email service to allow the government to gain access to Edward Snowden’s Lavabit account and read his emails.
What Levison did in that critical situation, with no help from well trained and highly payed lawyers, will always be a landmark for worldwide privacy supporters. And yes, he did reach out during trial to one of Apple’s lawyers, but didn’t have the kind of funds required to hire him.
In order to keep his promise to his customers, including Snowden, and preserve their online privacy, he closed down the company, without giving in to the FBI’s request.
Terrorism — the ever-perfect excuse
Terrorism is currently one of the greatest threats to global stability and we are nowhere near a game plan for combating it.
But, as a lot of political analysts agree, fighting terrorism at the cost of the entire planet’s privacy is simply wrong.
It’s almost the same logic as imprisoning everyone on the planet because they know that somewhere among all of us, some criminals exist. Is it normal for everybody to live behind bars on account of an unproved theory of an organization?
That’s why I think it’s crucial that all companies, not only the tech ones, should release each year a Transparency Report, showing their customers how many and what type of requests they received from authorities.
More surveillance strategies and tracking tools are definitely not what we need right now. We might just need a deeper understanding of the terrorism problem and more tech qualified people working for governments.
What’s next
Of course, we’re not debating who is better- both Snowden and Apple played their crucial part in the fight for our online privacy. They will influence everything that happens now in the field of civil rights, surveillance, and encryption.
Thanks to the buzz generated by the battle between the FBI and Apple, a lot of iPhone users learned a lot about encryption and how important it can be, and what their phones are capable of doing. It was a crash-course on encryption with very high stakes for the entire planet.
Setting a precedent for force-breaking encryption of a technology used by billions of people should be unsettling to us all.
One thing is certain: we need big tech companies to be guided by the 3 Musketeers principle, one for all and all for one, for the safety and privacy of their users.
We all need to be part of this security-privacy discussion and speak up our minds when we notice abuses. Starting today.
