With Congress poised to consider draft legislation that would give the FBI — or any law enforcement agency with a court-ordered warrant — the right to examine everyone’s encrypted data, the other back-door-kicking shoe appears ready to drop.
But even as the two sides square off in the ongoing struggle between security and privacy, Brent Fried — a University of California, Berkeley junior who was rushing into the International House Cafe to study for midterms this week — pulled out his iPhone’s earbuds and shrugged.
“I don’t understand why it’s such a huge deal,” he said. “It hasn’t been much of an issue for me.” Fried acknowledged he’d read about the FBI’s challenge to the sanctity of his Farmville crop rotation schedule, but said, “I’ve been focused on other things in my life.”
Public opinion surveys, influenced by the latest series of attacks in Paris, San Bernardino, Calif., and Brussels, suggest the pendulum of concern among Americans has swung back toward keeping the country safe. But while that natural instinct tends to wane in times of peace, privacy advocates shudder at the thought that their fellow Americans have become so addicted to technology that they lose sight of the implications.
Security v. Privacy can seem like a political abstraction — until the data being strip-searched are yours. “It’s asking a lot of people to care about every issue that actually they should care about, that does affect them,” said Andrew Crocker, staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. “I think a very unintended, but positive, consequence of this case is that the public had a chance to learn about this vulnerability. When the public learns about these things, it recognizes its interest in high-level policy or legal issues that might seem to be very abstract.”
The FBI’s aggressive pursuit of homegrown terrorist Syed Farook’s iPhone innards had implications for every network-connected digital device — not just products made by Apple, which recently boasted a billion connected customers worldwide. But there’s a very good reason there was little or no panic among users of those electronic devices. What were they supposed to do if Apple lost in court? Throw away their iPhones?
“The way technology is woven into our daily lives, you can’t do without it,” said Amy Dansker, 32, an employee at Epic Wines and Spirits, pulling an iPhone out of her hip pocket. “So what’s your other option? Are you gonna go back to a pager? I just assume that all my private information is already available through my IP address. You don’t even think privacy exists, because it doesn’t anymore, right?”
For all the Cupertino company’s dire warnings that perforating the iPhone’s secure encryption effectively meant the end of privacy, even in Silicon Valley there was only tepid interest in a legal battle that tech giants such as Google, Facebook and Apple portrayed as apocalyptic. Those same companies are heavily invested in data-mining their own customers, so the Justice Department’s demand to peek behind the veil of Farook’s iPhone 5c seemed to some a comparatively existential threat.
“I don’t feel worried because I don’t have anything to hide,” said Lara Purificacion, attending Cal’s Haas School of Business as an exchange student from Spain. “I’m not going to do a terrorist attack, so I don’t mind if they read my email with my professor.”
But Purificacion was also wary of Big Brother. “If you’re going to protect me and the rest of the citizens from terrorism, go ahead,” she added. “But just do it at specific times when the threat is big. Not just because you want to.”
Members of the U.S. Senate on Thursday began receiving briefings from the FBI on how the agency unlocked the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, one day after California Sen. Dianne Feinstein acknowledged she had already been told how law enforcement cracked the code of one of her biggest corporate constituents. Feinstein, who is co-sponsor of proposed legislation that would force companies to unlock encrypted devices, has said “the Achilles’ heel in the Internet is encryption.”
The way Natalie Plotnikova sees it, the arm of the law is getting too long. “I don’t really like it,” Plotnikova, 30, said Thursday as she waited to be cleared through security at the Federal Building in San Jose. “I don’t want the government to be able to use my phone to see my information.”
Silicon Valley companies face an ongoing battle with the FBI, which ended its legal challenge with Apple when it found a way into Farook’s iPhone — reportedly with help from Israeli company Cellebrite’s hack-in-a-box called the Universal Forensic Extraction Device. Feinstein might know the details, but the Justice Department has so far refused to tell Apple what vulnerability it exploited.
With the court case making headlines in February, a Pew Research Center survey revealed that 51 percent of Americans believed Apple should unlock the iPhone to assist the FBI’s investigation, while only 38 percent sided with Apple — and the presumption of privacy. The only group that divided nearly evenly on whether Apple should be allowed to keep their data private was 18-to-29-year-olds, with people over 65 the most devoutly pro-government.
“Talking to my neighbors, most of whom are retired, all of them were interested in this story and had a point of view,” said Mary Fisher, who lives in Saratoga and works for a software company. She did not think younger people took seriously enough the issues underlying their tendency toward oversharing. “I think they’re rather cavalier about their security,” she said. “Everything is out there, and their life story is on Facebook.”
A separate Pew study, conducted after National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s release of information swept up in huge troves by the NSA, indicated the vast majority of respondents (91 percent) felt they had lost control of their personal data. In the wake of the Snowden revelations, the White House appointed an expert panel to review the intelligence community’s activities.
One of its recommendations was that the government should, in almost every case, disclose vulnerabilities to companies such as Apple. The Vulnerabilities Equity Process created a formal procedure for sharing such information — a procedure the FBI has so far chosen to ignore.
“Part of why the government agrees with that view is they also use these devices,” said Crocker. “It really is a fact of life for most people that their lives are mediated by technology, and that they keep very, very sensitive banking and personal information on devices. And increasingly, those devices are vulnerable to being compromised by lots of different people, not just the government.”
©2016 The Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
