As digital privacy issues erupt worldwide, experts gathering in San Francisco are united that the government should not influence security technology

Efforts by the US government to compromise the security of technology companies such as Apple are “misguided”, a precursor to “tyranny” and “a path to hell”, according to computer security experts gathered in San Francisco this week.

The consensus at the RSA conference, where luminaries from the security community are gathered, is that Washington will have a hard time convincing Silicon Valley engineers to invent a technical solution to resolve the standoff between Apple and the FBI.

The judge has ordered the company to help the FBI bypass the passcode on an iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino killers, but many in the tech community simply don’t think a compromise is tenable.

Yet US attorney general Loretta Lynch told the same audience on 1 March that technology companies are threatening to break the country’s “social compact” if they don’t cooperate with authorities.

“Do we let one company, no matter how great the company, no matter how beautiful their devices, decide this issue for all of us?” she said.

Congress tells FBI that forcing Apple to unlock iPhones is 'a fool's errand' Read more

The case is only the latest chapter in a global debate over digital privacy. On 1 March alone, governments on three continents showed they were willing to battle technology companies publicly over privacy technology. In the US, lawmakers questioned Apple’s top lawyer over how it could better work with federal investigators. In Brazil, police arrested a Facebook executive after the company said it couldn’t supply information from its Whatsapp messaging app. In London, the government released legislation that would give the government more authority to hack into smartphones and computers.



But technology companies, as demonstrated at RSA, aren’t backing down either.

“The path to hell starts with the backdoor,” said Microsoft’s general counsel, Brad Smith. Backdoor refers to a guaranteed way to access otherwise private communications. Smith challenged the crowd to “stand up with Apple in this important case” and said that he hoped there could be a compromise in technology, but didn’t say what it could be.

Amit Yoran is president of the RSA, a company that pioneered much of modern encryption and hosts of this week’s conference. “Some of their policy proposals, like weakening encryption, are so misguided as to boggle the mind,” he said.

The computer security community has a long and complicated relationship with surveillance authorities. For decades, both sides worked together on solving some of the complicated math behind encryption technology. But there was always tension in how such technology was used. Three letter agencies wanted it for the state but feared widespread use of encryption could hamper intelligence collection. Technologists, who tend towards libertarianism, wanted to hamper intelligence collection.

“In a tyranny, you build mechanisms to deny people opportunities to take control of their actions,” said encryption expert Whitfield Diffie.

Moxie Marlinspike, a San Francisco developer who makes encryption messaging apps including Signal, said plainly: “Law enforcement is supposed to be difficult.”

Some regulators say they want to reach a compromise with technology companies. “I support encryption,” Lynch said on stage. But her presentation here was at times awkward, as she made clear how far of a divide there is between government and industry on the issue. “The middle ground is to divulge what the law requires.”

Lynch’s Justice Department currently is fighting Apple in a federal court over the company has to weaken an iPhone’s security controls to make it easier for investigators to guess the passcode, which Apple doesn’t have. The device was the work phone of Syed Farook, the gunman in the mass shooting in San Bernardino on 2 December 2015.

On 29 February, a federal judge in another case ruled Apple didn’t have to to assist the Justice Department in harvesting data from a phone involved in a criminal investigation.

Lynch said she was disappointed in the ruling and that her agency would be resubmitting its application for a search warrant.