Congrats, FBI, You've Now Convinced Silicon Valley To Encrypt And Dump Log Files

from the a-victory-for-privacy dept

“We have to keep as little [information] as possible so that even if the government or some other entity wanted access to it, we’d be able to say that we don’t have it,” said Gadea, founder and chief executive of Envoy. The 30-person company enables businesses to register visitors using iPads instead of handwritten visitor logs. The technology tracks who works at a firm, who visits the firm, and their contact information.

Stealth Worker — a start-up funded six months ago by the prominent incubator Y-Combinator — provides contract cybersecurity experts to early-stage start-ups, which often operate on a shoestring budget. Stealth Worker chief executive Ken Baylor said that in the past month he had been approached by a half-dozen companies looking for ways to build tougher encryption and other secure technical architectures.

“This is a Silicon Valley delusion that the government wants to outlaw encryption,” Stewart A. Baker, a former National Security Agency general counsel, said in an interview. “I grant that there is a radicalized subculture of engineers that is very prone to that delusion, but it is a delusion.”

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community. Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis. While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Soon after the original Snowden revelations, I went around talking to a bunch of startups and startup organizers, discussing whether they'd be more willing to speak out and complain about excessive government surveillance. Some certainly did, but many were cautious. A key thing that I heard over and over again was "well, our own data privacy protections... aren't that great, and we'd hate to call attention to that." Every single time I'd hear that I'd point out that this should now be their first priority:and fix your own handling of people's data, because it's an issue that's going to become increasingly important, and you're being foolish and shortsighted to ignore it.While the Snowden revelations certainly did get some companies to improve their own practices, it looks like the FBI's decision to go after Apple over encryption, has really galvanized many in Silicon Valley to take action to truly protect their users from snooping government officials -- meaning making use of real (not backdoored) encryption and also diong other things like dumping log files more frequently.The article is full of such stories -- including one of a company called Stealth Worker that is basically helping lots of startups build in better security from the start:Because it's the Washington Post, and they feel the need to be "balanced" the article does include the one ridiculous contrarian quote from our old friend , former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker, who basically dismisses reality as a myth in the heads of some engineers:This is classic Baker: saying something that avoids the actual truth by saying something that's nominally true, but not what people are actually discussing. The claim of "outlawing encryption" is really shorthand for "outlawingencryption that." And that'swhat many in the government are trying to do. I mean, there's no delusion necessary when you can just read the bill put forth by Senators Dianne Feinstein and Richard Burr, that absolutely would makeencryption illegal. Sure, it says you can keep encryption, but only if it includes a way for 3rd parties to decrypt it. And the only way that's possible is to introduce serious vulnerabilities into the encryption.The thing that Baker and many others trulyabout Silicon Valley is that when you give techies a challenge that involves making "the best" of something, they. The suggestions to backdoor encryption undermine that philosophy. They're saying that techies would need to. And the more that the FBI and clueless Senators push for such a solution, the stronger Silicon Valley will dig in and keep building better overall solutions that are less prone to government snooping.Maybe, just maybe, if the likes of the NSA and FBI hadn't regularly abused their snooping powers, folks would be more willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. But it's a bit late for that at this point.

Filed Under: doj, encryption, fbi, silicon valley, startups, surveillance