Recently the news has been flooded by the events of Apple and the FBI, both of whom are arguing in regards to encryption and companies being made to remove or bypass security features on government orders. Each side has arguments that are fair and it doesn’t look like the discussions will end anytime soon as each side makes point after point, for now though it would seem that President Obama weighs in with the FBI.
Answering a question in his keynote speech at the South by Southwest conference, President Obama started with “I can’t comment on that specific case” only to then follow-up by reminding people that law enforcement agencies can obtain a warrant then “rifle through your underwear to see if there’s evidence of wrongdoing”.
Obama carried on by saying that “we don’t want [the] government looking through phones willy-nilly”, a core concept at the heart of the Apple FBI argument, but re-enforced that we are looking at future where we will need “strong encryption” but in some cases, we may need to bypass that encryption. Raising the question around what would happen if we created technology that was so strongly encrypted, how would we catch people who are acting illegally.
Obama seems to be a fan of the master key scenario, in which a special key (or series of keys) could be used to gain access through robust encryption. In order to reduce the risk in this scenario though he would have the key “accessible by the smallest number of people possible for a subset of issues that we agree are important.”
Obama did accept that “how we design [such a system] is not something I have the expertise to do”, effectively stating that he wants to get support and backing from the companies that use this technology to help negotiate an acceptable answer for all to this solution.
