A Chance for Civil Discourse
A game is being played with your privacy and with your security. The hype around the current controversy of Apple vs. FBI misleads the public with the sort of vapid technical detail that should alarm leaders in our community. This is not an issue the 24-hour news cycle will solve. It must be addressed by technical and legal scholars.
In an effort to give relief to the technical and legal intricacies of this debate, the Denver/Boulder Cybersecurity Meetup hosted nearly 50 security, privacy and legal practitioners from the community for a discussion in early March. The featured speaker Gerrit Padgham, Owner and Principal at Electric Alchemy, put the specifics of the debate to the test.
The discourse embraced the seemingly undervalued notion of civil discourse in technology policy. The leaning of the membership was for privacy and security, and yet it affirmed that it’s a sensitive national security and civil liberties issue. The points made were appreciative of the Apple device in question holding important tactical and operational information for law enforcement, and that requests for access to it reflect another prominent societal value: keeping Americans safe from enemies foreign and domestic. But when those two worlds collide, a technically well-informed democracy makes for the most effective decisions on issues of this nature.
The general consensus was that a tolerable resolution will not be found in the court of public opinion and that further public posturing between parties will threaten any possibility of a thoughtful outcome. It is time to make way for private solution found among engineers — but not in a vacuum.
Cryptography is the result of thousands of years of human intellectual evolution. It is an application of mathematics not well understood by many. And this is what worries us. The outcome of this case risks violating core mathematical principles. While we must protect those principles, we must not lose sight of the potential costs for and real problems facing law enforcement in the modern era.
We accounted for the technical and legal aspects of the debate in our post, Brute Force: Privacy & Security in the Age of Cryptography, so we could open up the discussion and find out where others stand. We want to hear your comments!
Security practitioners know encryption rights are too important to be gambled away in a political process or lost on the whims of individual courts. It is possible that a party wins in court but loses the bigger battle for our liberty or security. Let us know where you stand.
Originally published at blog.secureset.com.
