WhatsApp Gets Apple Treatment

In the New York Time today, Matt Apuzzo [Messaging App Is Latest Front in Tech Debate] says the Apple treatment is coming to this app which encrypts messages and can't be read even when law enforcement has a court order.  As I said in my previous post, there are a whole lot of things that are encrypted, from hard disks to flash drives and Apple was just the first of cases to be considered.

What Justice is trying to make is a law that doesn't now exist to require vendors to provide a means to decrypt things they provide encryption for.  That would be a law similar to the one China enacted that requires any company operating in China to provide the means of encryption to the government.  This is counter terrorism legislation made up to look like something less intrusive than it really is.  The Chinese call it "draft legislation" while enforcing it, so it is really hard to tell what the real law looks like.  China keeps this kind of thing intentionally vague so that it can be interpreted by government officials who might not be lawyers.  We seem to do the opposite and neither of these approaches is probably the right one unless you are a Communist government that monitors its people on the Internet.

Justice has a point when they say a company should not do anything for China that it doesn't do for the U.S.  Only that is a bilateral way of thinking  in a multilateral world.  They shouldn't be doing it for China either.  China would just kick them out and make their lives difficult in the meantime by putting a few officials in jail or harassing them.

We have had laws that say encryption cannot extend across certain countries (I seem to remember France being one of them) and when Apple came along, everyone forgot about it.  Vodafone published a list of countries it allows access to when it does business in their borders.  Some of them have direct access to ISPs and Vodaphone can't stop them (the rest of the carriers are doing it too, but Vodaphone was nice enough to tell us).

There are a lot of hypocrites in this debate - on both sides.  Justice has it's share of them trying to manufacture a law from nothing.  The vendors have some who are willing to follow laws that they know allow other countries to monitor everything we do.  We could do the same, but have always chosen a different way.  We need a law, if we really want one, that requires vendors to provide the means to decrypt anything used in this country that might be encrypted by any means.  Let's hear Congress debate that one.

We already have laws on encryption that are not being enforced, and the alternative is to enforce them.  What we get from that is not what we want either, since privacy and security have more importance since they were written (a long time after the 1700's I should add).  This is a Justice Department that can't figure out whether it can indict Hillary Clinton for her private e-mail server( the Attorney General said she wasn't sure about it). But it can bring an action against Apple and get the President to back them up.  Hypocritical, yes.