Last month, South by Southwest 2016 opened with President Obama in a keynote conversation. He discussed the issue of privacy and security with Evan Smith, who is Editor in Chief of The Texas Tribune. (You can watch the video here.) I am sure that there were many people from the tech community in the audience for whom this is an extremely sensitive issue. Many executives from top tech companies signed a letter supporting Apple’s decision to resist the FBI's request for help breaking into the iPhone, which would subsequently compromise user privacy. Obama declined to speak specifically about the San Bernardino iPhone issue, but he did talk about the issue in a broader sense. He said, “The dangers are real. Maintaining law and order and a civilized society is important. Protecting our kids is important. And so I would just caution against taking an absolutist perspective on this, because we make compromises all the time.” (Obama, 2016)
One of the things that I admire about Obama is his ability to see the nuances in an issue. I think it is the mark of intelligence to recognize that things are rarely black and white. Life is lived mostly in the gray areas. Thus, I agree with Obama that we should not approach the iPhone issue with an absolutist point of view. Brian Barrett from WIRED also agreed, as he wrote, “It also should not be framed as an absolute. Doing so presents the issue to the American public in a way that makes the FBI’s request palatable while obfuscating the potentially dangerous precedent it would represent.” (2016)
What we should be striving for is the right balance between privacy and security, where in most cases, only the right people have access to someone’s phone. In this case, Apple was justified in refusing to build the tool that the FBI was requesting. It is too much to ask of them, as it would violate the trust that they had worked so hard to build with their users. The government should figure out how to handle these situations without depending on the industry. As it turned out, that is exactly what happened: the FBI didn’t need Apple’s help after all, as they were able to retrieve the data from the iPhone eventually. Now it is up to the American people to decide whether the FBI should have been allowed to break into the iPhone or not.
This is how it’s always been, in that the US government uses its own resources to protect Americans, and sometimes that involves accessing people’s private data. Whether Americans feel that the government has overstepped has always been debatable, and people should remember that public opinion can shift over time. Indeed, the post-9/11 world was marked by increased support for government surveillance. As Levi and Wall wrote in 2004, “Despite fierce opposition from pro-privacy groups, the shift towards increased dataveillance has tended to occur against a backdrop of increased public support and against a broadly muted opposition, providing policing and security agencies with a strengthened mandate to carry out obtrusive security measures that would not have been so readily tolerated previously.”
Years later, in June 2013, news broke that Edward Snowden had revealed documents pertaining to NSA surveillance programs. A poll conducted amongst Americans shortly afterwards showed that “three-quarters said they approved of the government’s tracking phone records of Americans suspected of terrorist activity. Nearly the same number approved of the United States’ monitoring the Internet activities of people living in foreign countries.” (Kopicki, 2013)
Clearly, many people support surveillance when it is framed as a need to combat terrorists. But the issue is never that simple, is it? Several community leaders have suggested that these issues be addressed in Congress, rather than through hastily developed local agreements or secret surveillance programs. That is something I wholeheartedly support, because it would allow America to have the discussion it so badly needs in today’s technology-driven world.
References
[Untitled illustration of a door with the Apple logo by Then One for WIRED magazine]. Retrieved April 15, 2016 from http://www.wired.com/2016/02/apple-fbi-privacy-security/
The Daily Conversation (Producer). (2016, March 11). Obama Explains The Apple/FBI iPhone Battle. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjvX5zq7BXg
Barrett, B. (2016). The Apple-FBI Fight Isn’t About Privacy vs. Security. Don’t Be Misled. WIRED. http://www.wired.com/2016/02/apple-fbi-privacy-security/
Kopicki, A. (2013). Poll Finds Disapproval of Record Collection, but Little Personal Concern. The Caucus (New York Times blog). http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/poll-finds-disapproval-but-little-personal-concern-about-record-collection/
Levi, M. and Wall, D. S. (2004). Technologies, Security, and Privacy in the Post-9/11 European Information Society. Journal of Law and Society, 31(2), 194-220.
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