“The battle over encryption of consumer internet users’ data has pitched US technology companies against the US government itself, former NSA general counsel Stewart Baker said on Tuesday,” Jemima Kiss reports for The Guardian. “Speaking at Web Summit in Dublin, Baker claimed that moves by Google and Apple and others to encrypt user data was more hostile to western intelligence gathering than to surveillance by China or Russia.”
“Baker said encrypting user data had been a bad business model for Blackberry, which has had to dramatically downsize its business and refocus on business customers. ‘Blackberry pioneered the same business model that Google and Apple are doing now – that has not ended well for Blackberry,’ said Baker,” Kiss reports. “Baker said the market for absolute encryption was very small, and that few companies wanted all their employees’ data to be completely protected.”
“Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, defended the tech firms, saying these businesses depend on trust and that the Snowden revelations had been ‘a shot across the bow for companies like Google,'” Kiss reports. “‘Where in the past there was a willingness to work with law enforcement, that time has gone,’ he said. ‘I have faith in the math [of encryption]. No-one can monitor that – and I’m not sure we want private law enforcement taking on the law and picking which traffic is good or bad.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: What did in BlackBerry was the Steve Jobs steamroller combined with deer-in-the-headlights half-CEOs distracted by NHL teams and content to rest upon their laurels while bullshitting investors, not encryption.
Of course the NSA and ex-government lawyers hate Apple’s encryption. That means it works.
Apple products are even more desirable because they are secure and offer users the ability to maintain their privacy.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. – Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free. – Ronald Reagan, March 30, 1961
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