Apple’s Tim Cook pushes White House to take stand on encryption

The Apple CEO is hailed by security experts and activists for his stance on privacy – arguing that putting backdoors in encryption to help authorities access users’ data is risky and must be avoided at all costs. “We have also never allowed access to our servers”.

According to a report, Coo even lashed out on some officials regarding the suggestion that the encryption technology that the tech companies like Apple uses should have backdoors built in to combat the use of encrypted communications on terrorism.

At the center of the debate is the use of back doors. Cook went on to call the government into denying the repeated requests of Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey to have special access for law enforcement into the company’s platforms.

Technologists and security experts counter that encryption is also used to protect vital financial, business and government data, and any attempt to weaken it will leave ordinary people more at risk from criminal and government hackers. France is considering banning strong encryption it can not crack altogether (a proposal experts say is technically unworkable), and there are calls in the United States to do similar.

Cook’s (and Apple’s) stance on encryption remains unchanged: Since iOS 8, Apple has made it so that it’s impossible for anyone (including itself) to be able to decrypt the data on an iOS device.

At a meeting to discuss counterterrorism, attended by representatives from companies including Facebook, Twitter, Google, DropBox, Microsoft and LinkedIn, Cook told White House officials they should state publicly “no back doors”.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has been known to regularly criticise the government for its stand on opening backdoors for the government on its encryption systems.

The omission adds credence to what surprisingly few tech CEOs have been saying about the White House’s lack of leadership regarding its position on unbreakable encryption.

The Washington Post reported in September that the White House had decided not to pursue legislation against unbreakable encryption.

This is not the first time that Cook has provoked the ire of government officials for Apple’s use of end-to-end encryption in its iMessage system.

Giving oral evidence to the joint committee on 13 January 2016, the home secretary said there were no plans to change the legal rule about encryption or to require service providers to hand over private encryption keys.