Tim Cook: "Weakening Encryption Or Taking It Away Harms Good People"

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday June 2, 2015 @06:20PM from the plans-i-crpytion-scheme-for-only-good-people dept.

Patrick O'Neill writes: Over the last year, Apple CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly made headlines as a spearpoint in the new crypto wars. As FBI director James Comey pushes for legally mandated backdoors on encryption, Cook has added default strong encryption to Apple devices and vocally resisted Comey's campaign. Echoing warnings from technical experts across the world, Cook said that adding encryption backdoors for law enforcement would weaken the security of all devices and "is incredibly dangerous," he said last night at the Electronic Privacy Information Center awards dinner. "So let me be crystal clear: Weakening encryption or taking it away harms good people who are using it for the right reason."

1 of 203 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re: Signs you are in trouble by IamTheRealMike · 2015-06-02 23:24 · Score: 4, Informative

How is this a hard problem? The Spideroak cloud storage service does this; uploaded files are encrypted before they leave your machine. Even the file names are secret; the servers have zero knowledge of the file's name or type or contents.
Services like SpiderOak sacrifice features people want, in order to get that. For instance, no search. No web preview or editing. Clunky sharing. No password recovery if you forget.
Still, I was mostly thinking about other services. If you look at some of the features Google Photos has like being able to do text search for untagged photos using image recognition, there's no technical way to do that in a blind manner right now.