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| Image courtesy of www.pewinternet.org |
After 9/11 2001 the Uniting and Strengthening America
by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act
of 2001 (aka USA PATRIOT Act) was passed by the legislative wing of the
government. What this act did was provide a significant increase in the
surveillance and investigative capabilities of law enforcement agencies within
the United States and the intention was to ensure that there can never be a
repeat of 9/11 on American soil. This act had the right intentions and at the
time it was passed, the whole Nation was speaking in unison; “we must get them”
and “never forget” were some of the themes.
According to the epic.org article titled USA Patriot Act, under surveillance and
privacy, there are three major laws that do not provide many of the protections
that were associated with the Federal wiretap statute (in place before the
Patriot Act).
The Title III
which requires probable cause and approval from a judge before conducting
real-time interceptions.
Electronic
Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). This act governs how law
enforcement can access stored email and other electronic communications. The act
states that the use of intercepting tools requires a court order but no
probable cause and the court must authorize the surveillance upon government request.
That statement shows just how vague the controls or checks and balances are
when it comes to electronic surveillance. The court order is just a formality.
Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). This act authorizes the
government to carry out electronic surveillance after obtaining a court order
that authorizes the surveillance and the only probable cause that they need to
provide is that the person of interest is acting as a foreign agent and this
applies even to American citizens.
There are many other acts within the Patriot Act that
give law enforcement even more authority to intercept, collect and even store
private information that they obtain through the use of advanced surveillance
tools in the name of National Security. The extent of these surveillance programs
within the United States was made public by Edward Snowden who leaked information
about how the National Security Agency collected electronic information. Snowden
received both support and criticism. His revelations did however lead to more
debates on how much privacy are we willing to give up in order to stay secure. The
civil liberties and privacy protections that have been part of America and that
the constitution dictates are slowly eroding. If you are a proponent of
security, your opinion is that security will always trump privacy and we should
be willing and expect to lose some of these liberties if we expect to be safe.
The biggest privacy issue this week is of course Apple
vs FBI. The FBI are trying to get Apple to create a backdoor that will enable
them to crack the deceased gunman Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone as they try to
access it to get information that may help them with their investigation.
Farook was involved in a terrorist attack that killed 14 people in California
late last year. As a security feature, Apple iPhones are built to wipe all data
after the password is entered incorrectly too many times which makes it popular
with companies as they can protect their intellectual property in cases where
employees lose their phones. The FBI’s brute forcing attempts must have hit a
roadblock and now they are asking Apple to intervene (through a court order). Apple’s
argument for non-compliance is that they are not comfortable sharing how to
by-pass the security feature with law enforcement as they do not know what
their reach will be after they gain the know-how.
“The
government is asking Apple to hack our own users and undermine decades of
security advancements that protect our customers — including tens of millions
of American citizens — from sophisticated hackers and cybercriminals… The
government suggests this tool could only be used once, on one phone. But that’s
simply not true. Once created, the technique could be used over and over again,
on any number of devices.”
-
Andrea
Noble - The Washington Times – quoting Apple CEO, Mr. Cook
The courts already ordered Apple to comply but they
are still resisting and have appealed to a higher court. I would not be
surprised if Apple took this all the way to the highest court in the land; they
certainly have the means. Protests are already planned with anti-surveillance
groups planning to let the FBI know how they feel about their request. This is
a contentious issue given that the phone that needs to be back-doored belongs
to a confirmed terrorist and not a suspect. In my opinion I think Apple will be
forced to give in. They may have a condition in place like not being required
to share how they did it but you never know, the FBI might get that too. I am
curious if Apple’s decision is truly based on its support of privacy or this is
just a marketing ploy to rally the masses to their products as they come out of
this fight as ‘champions of their customers’.
Whatever side of this topic you may be on, the fact
is, times are changing and we will always have this issue hover over us as long
as electronic communication is still around. You try to install an app and you
are supplied with a terms of agreement. For the application to function, you
need to allow it to access different things on your device. When browsing the
web, you have cookies that track your every move and if you were to turn these
feature off, you would probably not be able to experience the web the way we do
today. It seems like everything we do on the web requires some form of loss of
privacy.
The debate still rages on; are we willing to sacrifice
one over the other? ... because we cannot get both at the same time.
References
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