WASHINGTON – A top Apple lawyer and the FBI’s top tech official agreed Tuesday that cooperation between law enforcement agencies and the tech giant could avoid stand-offs over how to access encrypted data as well as the need for law enforcement to hire its own hackers to decrypt information of criminals and terrorists.
But they disagreed on what the cooperation would look like.
Bruce Sewell, Apple’s general counsel, told a House commerce oversight subcommittee that the company already works with law enforcement regularly and would help develop the FBI’s capability to decrypt technology itself, but won’t open “back doors” to its iPhones due to the security risk that would pose to all users. The FBI had demanded that Apple give access to the iPhone of San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook.
The FBI eventually paid third-party “gray hat” hackers in February to decrypt Farook’s iPhone. Sewell criticized the move as increasing vulnerabilities of innocent users.
But Amy Hess, the FBI’s science and technology chief, said the agency currently does not have the technology capability to access devices on its own, and isn’t likely to have it in the future.
Hess said building the capability to crack encryption on its own would take “a lot of highly skilled, specialized resources not available to us” and that the federal government will need cooperation from the technology industry to develop those resources.
What the FBI wants, Hess said, is “that when we present an order, signed by an independent federal judge, that (tech companies) comply with that order and provide us with the information in readable form.” How they do that is up to them, she said, saying the FBI has moved away from asking for a government back door based on Apple’s insistence that it is unworkable. “I don’t think the FBI, or law enforcement in general, should be in the business of dictating to companies what those solutions should be,” Hess told the subcommittee.
Both Hess and Sewell said the relationship between tech companies and law enforcement is, and should be, less adversarial than it looks like from the outside.
Sewell said the perception is “Apple vs. the FBI,” but in fact both want to balance protecting privacy while catching criminals who would use encryption to hide.
The difference, he said, is “the fundamental disconnect” in how they see the growth of technology in society. Law enforcement sees things “going dark,” or losing information, he said, while technologists “see a data-rich world that seems to be full of information. Information that law enforcement can use to solve — and prevent – crimes.”
As an example, he referenced photo DNA, where information embedded in photo files helps track those files across the Internet. Sewell said Apple has used this to help the FBI solve abductions, terrorism and child pornography distribution, concerns raised by members of the law enforcement panel.
Sewell also addressed a rumor mentioned by another witness, Indiana State Police technology expert Charles Cohen, who noted Chinese news agency reports have suggested that Apple had given source code for the iOS to the Chinese government while refusing to work with the FBI.
“We have not provided source code to the Chinese government,” Sewell told the committee. When Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., the subcommittee chairman, pressed the issue, Sewell told him, “We have been asked by the Chinese government, and we refused.”
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