President Obama, speaking at the SXSW Conference in Austin, Texas, late on Friday, March 11, said that his “conclusion so far” on the issue of encryption and the competing values of privacy and law enforcement access “is that you cannot take an absolutist view on this.”

“If your argument is strong encryption, no matter what, and we can and should, in fact, create black boxes, then that I think does not strike the kind of balance that we have lived with for 200, 300 years.  And it’s fetishizing our phones above every other value. And that can’t be the right answer,” he said in response to a question about the dispute between Apple Corp. and the Justice Department over accessing iPhones to which Apple does not have the password.

While President Obama said he could not speak to that case specifically, he offered a lengthy response weighing the values of privacy and individual security, on the one hand, against the values of effective law enforcement and protection of crime victims, on the other. He acknowledged that weakened encryption could create vulnerabilities that could be used by terrorists and hackers.  He also acknowledged that he believes that it is “technically true” that a key to access one device could be used to access all devices of that type.  “That’s just the nature of these systems.  That is a technical question. I’m not a software engineer.  It is, I think, technically true, but I think it can be overstated,” he said.

“I suspect that the answer is going to come down to how do we create a system where the encryption is as strong as possible, the key is as secure as possible, it is accessible by the smallest number of people possible for a subset of issues that we agree are important.  How we design that is not something that I have the expertise to do,” President Obama said.

“But I caution—I am way on the civil liberties side of this thing,” he said, adding, “I am not interested in overthrowing the values that have made us an exceptional and great nation simply for expediency.  But the dangers are real.  Maintaining law and order and a civilized society is important.  Protecting our kids is important.  And so I would just caution against taking an absolutist perspective on this.”

He likened access to encrypted data on a cellphone to security at airports and “stops for drunk drivers.  It’s an intrusion, but we think it’s the right thing to do.  And this notion that somehow our data is different and can be walled off from those other tradeoffs we make I believe is incorrect.”

He continued, “We do have to make sure, given the power of the Internet and how much our lives are digitalized, that it is narrow and it is constrained and that there’s oversight.  And I’m confident this is something that we can solve.  But we’re going to need the tech community—software designers, people who care deeply about this stuff—to help us solve it.”

He also warned that if “the tech community says, you know what, either we have strong, perfect encryption, or else it’s Big Brother and an Orwellian world—what you’ll find is that after something really bad happens, the politics of this will swing and it will become sloppy and rushed, and it will go through Congress in ways that have not been thought through.”

In response to a question about closing the digital divide, President Obama cited broadband investments funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and his administration’s ConnectED initiative, acknowledging that the latter is benefiting from the participation of the private sector.  He also pointed to the Opportunity Networks initiative to bring broadband access to public housing, rural communities, and low-income communities. —Lynn Stanton, lynn.stanton@wolterskluwer.com

Courtesy TRDaily