Earlier this week, we had heard reports of British
Prime Minister David Cameron calling for aban on encrypted
communication that
doesn’t provide access or can be read by security services. Yesterday, US
President Barrack Obama came to the defense of his British counterpart at a
joint press conference in the US, calling for tech companies to provide
backdoor to track people’s social media messages, according to The Hill.
US President Obama has requested technology
companies to create provisions for allowing government to track suspected
terrorists or criminals. According to Obama terrorists are adept at using
social media and the internet to communicate amongst themselves. “When we have
the ability to track that in a way that is legal, conforms with due process,
rule of law and presents oversight, then that’s a capability that we have to
preserve,” he said.
The fact that technology companies are isolating
user communications by using methods such as encryption, which prevents tapping
information without the user’s knowledge, has made it difficult for governments
to monitor communications. Obama called for a debate around laws which allow
the government agencies to snoop into the communications of a suspected
terrorist organisations or individual criminals.
David Cameron claims that his comments were taken out
of context and he never meant to say that encryption is bad and should be
banned everywhere. According to Cameron, the governments are ready to explore
legal ways to go about accessing data. But there wasn’t any concrete plan
shared about how government’s expected to go about it.
Technology companies such as Google and Apple have implemented stronger
encryptionmethods in their smartphones. Apple even goes to
the extent of claiming that the iOS8 locks out government officials from
accessing any data that may be stored on the phone. This has
understandably created bad blood between Apple and FBI. But Michael
Beckerman, the head of the Internet Association which represents tech giants
such as Facebook, Google and others said, “Just as governments have a duty to
protect the public from threats, Internet services have a duty to our users to
ensure the security and privacy of their data.”
Cybersecurity experts are not kicked about the idea of
providing governments backdoor access to personal information. According to
them, this same backdoor entry method can also be exploited by criminals or
officials from rival countries.
Whether technology companies will comply is something
we will have to wait and watch. But according to Beckerman, the whole point
behind Internet services increasing encryption is so that there is a push for
rule-bound and transparent policy in place, for the governments to be able to
access user data.
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