Elizabeth Weise

USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO – The cybersecurity industry came out swinging Tuesday in favor of Apple in its fight against the FBI’s demand that it build a backdoor into an iPhone operating system.

“The path to hell starts at the backdoor and we need to make sure that encryption technology remains strong,” Microsoft President Brad Smith told a packed ballroom as the RSA computer security conference began here.

More than 40,000 people from across the globe are attending RSA this week, a record. The issue of Apple and the FBI featured in almost every speaker's remarks during the opening plenaries.

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RSA President Amit Yoran began the barrage by saying that weakening encryption is solely for the ease and convenience of law enforcement for pursuing petty criminals.

“No credible terrorists or nation states would ever use technology that is knowingly weakened. However, if we weaken our encryption, you can sure bet that the bad guys will use that and exploit it against us,” he said.

Such policies will hurt U.S. economic interests and unconscionably undermine those working to protect the digital environment, he said.

Apple questions FBI's right to compel creation of anti-encryption software

His words were being heard not just by cryptographers, computer security companies and programmers, but also by Michael Rogers, director of the National Security Agency, U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, members of Congress and national cyber security czars from around the world, he told the audience. All of those high-ranking individuals were planning to attend the conference.

That attention wasn't license to go on the attack, he said.

“We need to be respectful but we also must make sure that our voices are heard loud and clear,” he told the audience.

Government asks for dialog

The U.S. government clearly realizes how important the field is.

“Cyber is the new black. Everyone cares about it. Every government cares about it,” said U.S. State Department Coordinator for Cyber Issues Chris Painter. He won an excellence in public policy award at RSA.

In Tuesday's final keynote, Michael Rogers, commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, said his challenge is to both insure the protection and privacy of citizens and of their rights.

That’s taking place when “we find ourselves in a space where there are those who want to use that same technology to harm,” said Rogers, who is also director of the National Security Agency, and chief of the Central Security Service.

Clearly referring in part to the Apple and FBI discussion, he told the audience the issues at stake are “so fundamental and so important to us as a nation that I believe our citizens need to be the ones who say ‘This is what we are comfortable this is what we are not comfortable with. This is acceptable to us and this is not,’” he said

He implored RSA attendees to be part of the dialog. “It’s time for all of us to stop talking past each other and start talking to and with each other,” he said.

Microsoft after the Paris attacks

Opposing the FBI’s request doesn’t mean that technology companies don’t realize they play a crucial role in security and law enforcement work, said Microsoft’s Smith.

After the Paris attacks in November 2015, Microsoft received 14 requests from law enforcement agencies seeking information about terrorist suspects at large in France and Belgium, Smith said.

Once the company confirmed they were lawful, the average response time to get the information to law enforcement was 30 minutes, he said.

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But security doesn’t mean allowing unlawful requests.

“We also need to stand up for customers,” he said.

In the end, “there is no such thing as national security without cyber security. We cannot keep people safe in the real world if we cannot keep people safe on the Internet,” he said.

That became abundantly clear when trust in the government was questioned after the revelations made by Edward Snowden in 2013, Smith said.

For that reason, strong encryption — the ability to encode data so that it’s unbreakable by anyone except the owner of the encryption key – is crucial, he said.

“There is no technology that is more important than encryption. That’s why we need to stand up and be vocal,” Smith said. “We need to engage in public debate.”

The RSA conference name comes from the initials of its co-founders, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Len Adleman, who wrote the groundbreaking RSA public key cryptography algorithm.

Follow @eweise for ongoing coverage.