Major IT trade association, the Information Technology Industry Council (ITIC) has urged western governments not to give in to heightened calls to weaken encryption security in the wake of the Paris terror attacks.
The atrocities by Islamist extremists in the French capital have been seized upon by some as proof that the security services should be able to access the content of messages on services like iMessage and WhatsApp currently secure by end-to-end encryption.
Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton and UK prime minister David Cameron’s chief speechwriter, Clare Foges, are among those who’ve broached the subject in the days since 13 November.
The latter wrote a particularly ill-judged piece in the Daily Telegraph in which she called on Silicon Valley’s finest to do the impossible; find a workaround to end-to-end encryption which would “keep the good guys’ data secure and keep the bad guys in plain sight.”
“Paris must be a wake-up call,” she added.
“If they had any conscience at all, these great Western powerhouses of the 21st century would be joining the fight to preserve our way of life—not helping to facilitate Islamic State’s way of death.”
But the tech industry has hit back.
In an unequivocal statement, ITIC president and CEO Dean Garfield argued that this same encryption stops criminals from draining customers’ bank accounts, and keeps IT systems in cars and planes secure from cyber attack.
“We deeply appreciate law enforcement's and the national security community’s work to protect us, but weakening encryption or creating backdoors to encrypted devices and data for use by the good guys would actually create vulnerabilities to be exploited by the bad guys, which would almost certainly cause serious physical and financial harm across our society and our economy,” he added.
“Weakening security with the aim of advancing security simply does not make sense.”
The ITIC represents some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names, including Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple.
The statement chimes with comments made by Apple boss Tim Cook in Ireland last week in which he refused to bow to pressure from the UK government to weaken end-to-end encryption.
Rafael Laguna, CEO of comms provider, Open-Xchange, backed the ITIC.
“Despite recent, terrible events, the fundamental problem with weakening encryption remains unchanged: it compromises the privacy and security of law abiding citizens while failing to prevent terrorists from communicating through encrypted channels,” he argued.
“We must dispel the harmful myth that privacy is the enemy of security; encryption prevents terrorists and nation states from accessing critical information and keeps us safe.”
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