‘Knife’s edge’: Showdown looms on encryption
Tech firms oppose demands to open ‘back door’
Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale says Canada has to find a balance between internet privacy and the needs of law enforcement in the midst of a long-simmering dispute among Five Eyes countries and tech companies about encryption “backdoors.”
“We need to work with the internet companies and the service providers to achieve two objectives simultaneously. The objective of the privacy values that flow from strong new technologies and encryption, but at the same time making sure that our platforms and services and systems are not harbouring the kind of behaviour that would exploit children and create victims,” said Goodale.
“The privacy commissioner and others would not, I’m sure, make the argument that the system should be designed in such a way that it becomes the secret preserve of those who would exploit children, for example.”
Goodale’s comments came at a news conference on Tuesday announcing more money for Canada’s national strategy to prevent child exploitation and the minister warned that people who prey on children, as well as other lawbreakers, could exploit encrypted communications to evade police and plan crimes.
Tech firms that deal in encrypted communications have warned there’s no way to provide access to law enforcement without also endangering the privacy of their users. Apple, in particular, has argued that any “backdoor” created for law enforcement would inevitably be exploited by nefarious actors, like criminals and authoritarian governments looking to spy on citizens.
The encrypted information usually takes two forms: data that is “locked” on a phone with a password and data that is encrypted while in transit, like an Apple imessage. For Facetime and imessages, Apple even boasts that it can’t crack the encryption of the messages travelling from person to person.
With recent legislation in Australia that requires firms to install security backdoors — possibly without the knowledge of most of the company’s own employees — and increasingly stern comments from lawmakers in the United States, experts believe it’s only a matter of time before a confrontation erupts. In the past, Apple has refused these kinds of requests and has promised to keep fighting them.
“We’re closer to the knife’s edge than we’ve been for some time," said Christopher Parsons, a senior research associate at Citizen Lab, in the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.
Thanks to the new rules, “Australia has been seen as a dangerous place to develop security products,” said Parsons. That could come with a severe economic cost as companies pull employees out of the country.
Goodale said he wouldn’t comment on the Australian legislation but said privacy has to be balanced with the concerns of law enforcement.
The intelligence alliance known as Five Eyes — Canada, the United States, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand — has been calling for a solution to its problem with encryption for years and has been using increasingly harsh language.
“Tech companies should include mechanisms in the design of their encrypted products and services whereby governments, acting with appropriate legal authority, can obtain access to data in a readable and usable format," reads the communique from the July meeting of senior ministers of the alliance.
United States Attorney General William Barr went even further, saying he’s tired of hearing “dogmatic pronouncements” that lawful access to encrypted communications can’t be done.
“While we remain open to a co-operative approach, the time to achieve that may be limited,” said Barr. “The status quo is exceptionally dangerous, unacceptable, and only getting worse.”
Barr warned that encrypted communications are “imposing huge costs on society.”
Parsons said he’d like to see more evidence and transparency from law enforcement agencies in relation to those claims, noting that crime statistics have been going down in recent years.
If crime is going down, is it really worth “systemically compromising the entire communications network for everyone in Canada?" asked Parsons.