I don’t often talk about politics here because it’s an alienating topic. It is what it is.
Every now and then, though, political news touches on things that make sense for me to discuss. Such as a recent open letter from over 50 tech companies, public-interest groups, and academics urging the Obama Administration to knock it off already when it comes to calls for more access to data on smartphones and other technological devices and services. USA Today writes about it today with the click-baity title “Apple and Google to Obama: Hands Off Our Phones!” but many other news orgs, beginning with the Washington Post, are talking about the letter (PDF), too.
The letter is in response to comments made in April by Administration officials who expressed concern about encryption technology being present in our devices. In other words, law enforcement doesn’t like how it can sometimes be difficult to get into people’s phones and computers. The signatories to the letter, however, state: “Whether you call them ‘front doors’ or ‘back doors,’ introducing intentional vulnerabilities into secure products for the government’s use will make those products less secure against other attackers. Every computer security expert that has spoken publicly on this issue agrees on this point, including the government’s own experts.”
Enter Cynicism
It all sounds like privacy-positive advocacy, and it certainly has a bunch of good names attached to it. The American Library Association, ACLU, EFF, EPIC, The Tor Project, Human Rights Watch… All names that you would want to see attached to such a letter. But the cynic in me (remember, I mentioned that attorneys tend to be cynical) notes that among the corporate signatories–the list of which includes Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, CREDO mobile (which coincidentally just sent me an email), and Hewlett Packard, just to name a few–there are some notable exceptions. None of the major ISPs or telecoms are signatories, for example. AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, Time Warner, Comcast, Cox, and Charter are nowhere to be found. (Of course, their appearance would be highly suspect considering the controversies surrounding NSA access to certain companies’ records. On the other hand, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! were all mentioned in the first leak of the Snowden documents, so it’s all a mess, and, again, is why I’m a cynic.)
That there is a need for such a letter to be written is a reflection of the extremely high value attached to personal data, perhaps seen most starkly in the sale of RadioShack’s assets. Not only can (and does) law enforcement and intelligence-gathering outfits make use of personal data to investigate individuals and “threats,” but corporate interests want the data to continue flowing for their own pecuniary gains. In other words, every entity that is not a consumer wants data to flow freely.
I say consumers don’t really want data to flow freely because I don’t know anyone who really likes that searching for, say, a toaster on Amazon means that for the next few days you’ll be seeing ads for the same toaster on a variety of other websites. Yes, there are certainly ways to get around tracking cookies, but at some point I think the majority of people just give up. And yes, services like Google Now that will pop up your plane ticket automatically on your phone when you get to the airport relies heavily on access to your personal data to function; I think most consumers would be fine with getting the same services if there were a way to get them without providing all their personal data to Google. Then again, I say that, and then I read an article from 2014 which says that only a bare majority of poll respondents thinks that tech companies have encroached too much. So, maybe I’m wrong.
While the government and the corporations both have an interest in free-flowing data, both columns contain the seed for having away all the nice things taken away. If I had to guess, though, I’d say that the government ultimately has the trump card. Backdoors already exist, whether they are covert (as the Snowden documents have shown) or explicit (CALEA and the FCC expansion). And the government keeps agitating for more and more access, despite periodic letters criticizing such agitation. At the same time, personal data is flowing in ever-increasing ways, with, as noted, a slim majority of people having concerns about the stream. I’m cynical about ever putting the personal data genie back in the bottle, but I hope I’m proven wrong.
