The last few weeks may have seemed to signal a unique fork in the road between the U.S. and its primary Five Eyes ally, the U.K. But it isn’t. In December, the FBI and CISA warned Americans to stop sending texts and use encrypted platforms instead. And now the U.K. has forced open iCloud to by threatening to mandate a backdoor. But the devil’s in the detail — and we’re fast approaching a dangerous pivot.
While CISA — America’s cyber defense agency — appears to advocate for fully secure messaging platforms, such as Signal, the FBI’s view appears to be different. When December’s encryption warnings hit in the wake of Salt Typhoon, the bureau told me while it wants to see encrypted messaging, it wants that encryption to be “responsible.”
What that means in practice, the FBI said, is that while “law enforcement supports strong, responsibly managed encryption, this encryption should be designed to protect people’s privacy and also managed so U.S. tech companies can provide readable content in response to a lawful court order.” That’s what has just happened in the U.K. Apple’s iCloud remains encrypted, but Apple holds the keys and can facilitate “readable content in response to a lawful court order.”
Now what are they going to do in their ideal world? Force every service provider to implement key eschrow?
This isn’t new, the FBI has wanted this for decades
Unlike the UK however, the United States has a 4th Amendment in our constitution that makes any such attempt to mandate backdoors blatantly illegal. Thus far, over many court cases and years, the courts have consistently ruled in favor of encryption rights.
Here’s some related food for thought - in 2015, the FBI tried to legally bully Apple into backdooring encryption in iPhones, and put up the data of all US citizens to the FBI.
Some forms of encryption were designed so that even Apple could not break them, so the FBI wanted Apple to sabotage its own security, write malware for its own systems.
Apple refused, much to their credit.
The FBI then announced a year later that they hacked the phone anyway.
The FBI has always, always, always opposed the right to privacy, even as far back as their union-busting and COINTELPRO days. And they have done and will continue to do every slimy measure they can to spy on us.
