U.K. kicks Apple’s door open for China
Summary
Beijing would quickly exploit the British order to allow access to encrypted data.
The U.K. has ordered Apple to build a backdoor that would allow the British government to download and read the private encrypted data of any iPhone user anywhere in the world. This would be a massive downgrade in the security features that protect the privacy of billions of people and that made Apple one of the world’s most valuable companies.
Congress must immediately enact a law prohibiting American tech companies from providing encryption backdoors to any country. This would create a “conflict of laws" situation, allowing Apple to fight this order in U.K. courts and protect Americans’ safety and security.
The U.K. government’s demand comes at a peak of global cyber conflict. Hackers from Russia continue to run roughshod over businesses, demanding millions of dollars in ransom to return access to computers and data. The Chinese Ministry of State Security successfully hacked most major U.S. telecom providers and the U.S. Treasury. They even targeted Mr. Trump and the Kamala Harris campaign. Following these attacks on our national security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reversed its hostility toward end-to-end encryption and recommended that Americans use encrypted message applications to protect themselves against foreign adversaries.
The U.K. law, colloquially known as the “snooper’s charter," grants the British government unprecedented power to compel tech companies to weaken the security of the devices Americans use every day. Other countries have attempted to regulate encryption in ways that would compromise the security of users worldwide, but the major U.S. tech companies have refused to build features for either democratic or autocratic governments that would make encryption worthless to consumers.
This order from the U.K. threatens to blow a hole in that stance, and not only for Apple. The strength of end-to-end encryption comes from the idea that security is based on math, not politics. Apple designed iCloud with an “advanced data protection" mode that makes data impossible for anyone but the user to retrieve. Google does the same for Android backups, while WhatsApp, Signal and Apple Messages provide similar security for chats. Yet once one country demands an exception to encryption, the decision about who can access data becomes political. To Apple, China is much more important than the U.K.; it’s a much larger market and the place where most Apple devices are manufactured. If the British crack the encryption door an inch, the Chinese will kick it open.
Mr. Trump and Congress have made protecting Americans from China a top priority. They can prove their commitment by guaranteeing Americans that the encryption securing our phones and computers can’t be broken by any foreign governments.
Mr. Green is a cryptographer and professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins. Mr. Stamos is chief information security officer of SentinelOne and a lecturer in computer science at Stanford.
