Josh Gagliardi, our Chief Technology Officer IPVanish here, had the opportunity to talk with Katie Benner from the New York Times. Katie is a journalist whose recent coverage with the Times shined a light on the details of the encryption war between Silicon Valley and the United States government. Katie and Josh have discussed the current state of the battle between Apple and the FBI, the fallout from the case in California, how Richard Burr (R-NC) and (D-CA) Dianne Feinstein proposed draft anti-crypto law could affect the debate, and more! Listen to the podcast now or read the full transcript below.
Transcript
Josh IPVanish of Hi everyone, welcome to Secure Sessions. I'm Josh Gagliardi CTO IPVanish VPN. Today we speak of the case Apple / FBI and what comes next. Our guest is Katie Benner New York Times, which covered extensively the great debate encryption and are pleased to have with us today. Let's start.
So Katie first describe the experience working on stories where you have these titanic forces react to each other so quickly.
Katie Benner from The New York Times: First, thank you for me to have Josh. You are right. There were very big players. You have one of the most powerful governments of the world, some say on most powerful government, and some would say one of the most powerful brands in the world competed.
what was so interesting is that the two actually believed that much was at stake, but for completely different reasons. Apple felt it really, really big for them. He went far beyond a single phone and a single case and this will create a precedent for all sorts of behavior in the future.
For the FBI and prosecutors from the Department of Justice, they also felt that something big was at stake, but they said it was just because the case itself was huge. This was a very serious act of domestic terrorism that had happened last year, which was perpetrated by people who were self-professed terrorists who had killed many people in California
JG :. Interesting, and so, as a fan of the west wing there a long time, we all have this vision of how governments and journalists to interact simultaneously on the record and off the record. What was the pace of this in terms of how they were rushing to repeat or clarify, because they both saw it as so urgent, there were times when we saw several press releases per day that case.
KB: right, of course. (8:31)
So there was a rhythm that was dictated by the schedule of hearings, for timing information to the Court. As you recall, the government has received authorization from a judge for an order that would force Apple to create a new code and help open this phone. And as part of this order, it was very common. Apple was given X number of days to respond and say why or why not if it would create undue burden and why or why not they comply with the order, and as we know, Apple has chosen not to comply.
so there was an information schedule every two weeks, the Court would allow one side or the other to file a brief explaining their position generally. But there was also the timing of what was happening between these memories. Apple had its own set of calls and editorials conference, different editorial writing frames. You had Tim Cook appears on the network news, you have other people releasing public materials directly by saying this is our opinion and that's where we are.
And then you had behind the scenes, the FBI and the Department of Justice to build call with journalists groups to try to repeat again the arguments they had in their memories. And in some ways, the FBI was a little more hand-strung because they do not feel able to go directly to the public in the same way that Apple can. They do not have an integrated public clients who love the brand
JG :. Right. (10:03)
KB: So instead you had the FBI director James Comey trying to form this role with editorials and speeches, and so, when they would be reiterating their position. So between the briefings, you have been times when the two parties came out strong and tried to win this war of public opinion.
Even journalists, for us, it was a daily race to ensure that we kept up with these events. So as to make the executive decision, well, is this coating value and if so, how do we cover every single statement made by someone on one of these sides or we find a way to sort of contextualize a few of them at a time so that people understand why the stolen steal
JG :. Interesting. Simultaneously, we were on top of RightsCon in San Francisco, in fact, a Mission Bay Conference Center
And Senator Ron Wyden came out in Part CryptoSummit effectively announce a proposed pro-cryptography legislation - . Its first tenant was to say that United States government should not be in the business to require the rear doors and try to put him to bed Well the same time you have the current case, then on Friday we get a senator from a neighboring state effectively introduce a draft law diametrically opposed to the mandate rear doors. It will be interesting.
What you read in the timing of this? What is the draft law related to Feinstein San Bernardino compared to respond? Or was it a version on a Thursday and Friday and hope nobody notices these things
KB :. As far as I can tell, the Feinstein bill is something that was in the works well before the case San Bernardino, between the particular argument between Apple and law enforcement broke wide open.
So, it was not created in response to the argument between Apple and the FBI, I think not. Again, as I understand, there was a version of the bill Feinstein Burr-there was talk before this happened. Certainly, it heats the larger national argument heated but I think what we found is that on both sides of the debate, it has become a real opportunity for both sides to put forward strong arguments, either Ron Wyden and Feinstein.
Because until, I would say to Edward Snowden, the country is not really concerned itself too much with the details of how law enforcement was going investigations. And the kinds of civil rights or freedoms we may or may not be giving up. And if they try to find ways to use technology to their advantage, and getting around the fact that the technology was more difficult life, which was not something that was a huge national conversation.
And even after Edward Snowden, when it became a national conversation because of mass surveillance programs were revealed, even that was really wobbly. And many people did not participate. Suddenly, because it is Apple, and it's such a great brand, and everyone has a smart phone or almost everyone, so people are very opinionated about how their personal devices should be treated. Even if people do not understand the details of the case, you had a national interest than if you were a politician, if you were a legislator trying to get traction for a kind of bill, now is the time to do it. Now is the time to be introducing something or dredge something up that may or may not have happened before and tell
JG 'we will reexamine it.' Now you all as a legendary newspaper run one more worthy comments sections on Internet.
But I was interested, we live in this world as a service by trying to provide enhanced privacy for people, what we think about all day. But demographically, or looking on the importance of this history, looking at the comments, there was sort of the level of national interest, you think there should have been normal people, or have you was becoming the industry and policy wonk commentators?
KB: I do not know. I'm really impressed that we get a lot of comments from people who are not involved in the industry. And that includes people who are activists, who for them, they feel that their devices are really important for the work they do, and they are not really the idea of the government being able to obtain, see that their contacts could be or who they would call; observe and monitor their actions in a way, to ordinary citizens who just said oh, I do not really understand, people on both sides who have very firm beliefs about how technology should or should not help the application of the law.
And I really think that we have obtained robust input from all kinds of people. And it was one of the things we actually wrote a story about it because it was really surprising that such cases almost always get lost in the shuffle and they fall to the back and forth between political advisers and cryptographers and technologists and people who are very, very deep in these industries. While people like my uncle or grandparent would not be as strong of an opinion, we are seeing all kinds of people really care. (3:53 p.m.)
JG: This is fantastic. As someone who has thought about this stuff for a while, it was good to see some level of understanding of the differences in these issues. That it was not a case of Dragnet surveillance, but it was well on targeting specific people and it is encouraging to see that this idea of unintended consequences was actually a bit to be understood by the general public.
KB: Yes, it was certainly interesting to see. And again, it was a debate where there was no clear winner in the court of public opinion. All the polls said again and again that this was roughly divided 50/50. Maybe the FBI would be released seven points ahead a day or Apple come out a couple of points ahead. These are the margins of error. People were literally divided. This is another fascinating thing because it showed that it was a debate with no easy answers. This is also why it made a good story
JG :. And one of the things that was interesting for the rest of us have this idea that you had FBI commenting on areas such as national security agencies are normally more directly involved. Sort between the lines, many of us had the impression that this meant that the NSA had stopped to help, or they do not think the performance is interesting in this particular case. Or maybe it was really was more of an effort to public policy. As part of this, never did anything out of Fort Mead in this particular case? (5:31 p.m.)
KB: We had a lot of old people in the NSA and the security of people talk about the encryption is important. But no one would tell whether the NSA was secretly help Apple, and I think that makes much sense. This is one of those areas where, in cases like this, everything that is used becomes part of the record of the Court
JG :. Right. What we call the cryptographer's dilemma not to advertise the capabilities
KB :. Exactly. And for many reasons the people of national security do not want people to know what their capabilities are, or what their abilities are. So you can understand why having any Court file that a particular method has been tried by another agency and failed a situation is just as difficult to manage as a method to be tried by national security and have this method successfully.
JG: Therefore, when looking from the side of privacy and encryption of things to the court of public opinion or the level of interest you see in things how many government monitoring in relation to a commercial follow-enter what people are worried about, or they ask about
KB :. You know, people do not really seem to follow the staff in mind. The kinds of monitoring that ad tech companies and many other Internet services we use, what kind of information that is collected on. People do not seem to mind that much. And he has not even the idea of government oversight in this case that bothered people either, because remember that the government is eager to get a look at the data of a person who helped murder a list of people.
JG: law. It was the strongest possible place from which they could apply
KB :. And it was not a request on surveillance, monitoring or data encryption is. That was what was so fascinating. The government has been very, very clear again and again that they were not asking Apple for anything de-encrypt, and they did not require a back door as we would traditionally think, which is a kind of skeleton key to encryption services or other kinds of safety functions.
They were really just say you know what, if you can do your password security system, which is not even something that is part of this debate ever, if you are just a little lower and then we brute force our way and we'll do the rest. And we will or will not get the data. It was a very different request. And I think that leading to Monday in February when the government obtained this order, people were preparing for something very different, defenders of privacy and people in the encryption community and technologists were really are preparing for a sort of big ask they were going to use this terrorist attack to get some sort of skeleton key, back door, and so on. And instead, they went in a completely different angle that I think people were really surprised.
So when this debate was taken to the public, it does not really a debate about whether the government should be allowed to keep their data or the government should be allowed to weaken encryption on their text messages are things that we exceeded earlier he was'? the government may ask a private company to write code
JG: And as a software engineer, which was absolutely the most interesting part of this. This idea that you might be required to produce a mechanism, rather than help simply subvert or provide access to data of an individual person
KB :. Right. And some would say that is even more dangerous. But it was interesting because it was not the kind of debate we had. So I think a lot of people do not even understand this subtlety and saw you again and again the debate will be wrapped in encryption, and rear doors and so on, people without going into details of what was requested. It is therefore clear that it introduces in the greatest anxiety about exactly what you said, which is monitoring. Why people hate when the government looks, but they do not seem to care if Google looks
JG :. And my personal belief is that it may just be that we did not have enough sufficiently detailed data leakage so that people are aware of the level of monitoring of companies is involved. It seems that in some sense or governments of various businesses not centered information were mainly victims of leaks, largely because I believe that economic incentives for data theft are far targeted theft money or steal reputation. Whereas a kind of demonstrative flight of loss of privacy, nothing scary has yet taken place in this space. But perhaps it will be very soon and people will begin to realize. ( 10:49 p.m.)
KB: Right. And there is also the perception that the government is watching you, they can take steps that would hinder your life. They bring you in for questioning, they can arrest you, they can find all your friends ... there are things that can happen that it would actually be extremely disturbing or frightening. And there is less of a sense of what would happen if the observation of Google, the cops probably will not come knocking on your door because Google decided to sell pieces of your search history in other parts Google and use it to refine their other services. This is certainly the perception, I think
JG :. How to resolve a complicated story like this when one of the security challenges everything about is that it is complicated, the terms are somewhat fiddly, everyone uses the word security, but does not realize that it means a few different things. How do you decide what to include, what pieces of it to showcase? How do you keep everyone from getting distracted from the tangent, but not the issues involved in this particular story
KB: I think for us it was a little different because we are a general journal, we are not a publishing technology. There are a few publications dedicated to security only, or only to technology, or just for business. So we have a different challenge was, we still are addressing the large group. We are always treated the population and trying to make sure they understand why the stories of importance to them. For us, our challenge was to not get too many weeds, and watch the overall image of the debate without being too technical. And it's not always easy, but certainly that's what we had to do.
And we did not only how we describe things in every story, but the stories we have chosen. So, do we really want to go into the weeds on the real, technical demand that the government put forward in its court papers, or do we want to kind of be more general about it.
And the biggest story more interesting for users of Apple products and the company is that Apple engineers have already begun to develop these security measures that would make it impossible for the government to break in a phone using the methods he had tried in this case. So even if they were to lose in San Bernardino, the San Bernardino case, Apple engineers have tried to find a way to resolve this issue so that they may never be asked to do it again. So that tells a different kind of story, tells the story of cat and mouse between the largest government and the technology that is still going on. And it's kind of contextualizes these very technical or wonky things and points out that the biggest cross well you and I are using our smartphones every day, somewhere in the background, there are enforcement officers law and technology companies, always this push and pull of their needs and desires of this phone can and can not do. ( 26:06)
JG: I think one of the most interesting aspects for us is to see how quickly the rules must adapt by report how quickly they actually fit. And almost sense that if things have slowed down enough to write consistent rules that make sense, it's almost a sign that, at least in the kind of traditionalist view of technology as well as space must be dead. We have to move to another because we can actually write the rules here.
If you think about the major versions, or even minor versions of operating or clients such as WhatsApp just system is, the changing landscape and changing the dialogue functionally everyone must again and understand what the rules again. This means that we are in an interesting place and an interesting space for debate and the legal aspect of the invention.
Well, thank you very much for talking to us. We were grateful to see the skillful articulation of these issues in one of the major newspapers. So, thank you for spending some time with us
KB.! Thank you, I wish you a nice day
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