Obama Heads to Tech Security Talks Amid Tensions
Obama Heads to Tech Security Talks Amid Tensions
By DAVID E. SANGER and NICOLE PERLROTH FEB. 12, 2015
PALO ALTO, Calif. — President Obama will meet here on
Friday with the nation’s top technologists on a host of cybersecurity issues
and the threats posed by increasingly sophisticated hackers. But nowhere on the
agenda is the real issue for the chief executives and tech company officials
who will gather on the Stanford campus: the deepening estrangement between
Silicon Valley and the government.
The long history of quiet cooperation between Washington
and America’s top technology companies — first to win the Cold War, then to
combat terrorism — was founded on the assumption of mutual interest. Edward J.
Snowden’s revelations shattered that. Now, the Obama administration’s efforts
to prevent companies from greatly strengthening encryption in commercial products
like Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android phones has set off a new battle, as
the companies resist government efforts to make sure police and intelligence
agencies can crack the systems.
And there is continuing tension over the government’s
desire to stockpile flaws in software — known as zero days — to develop weapons
that the United States can reserve for future use against adversaries.
President Obama is scheduled to meet with the leaders of
top technology companies Friday at Stanford University in California. Credit
Max Whittaker for The New York Times
“What has struck me is the enormous degree of hostility
between Silicon Valley and the government,” said Herb Lin, who spent 20 years
working on cyberissues at the National Academy of Sciences before moving to
Stanford several months ago. “The relationship has been poisoned, and it’s not
going to recover anytime soon.”
Mr. Obama’s cybersecurity coordinator, Michael Daniel,
concedes there are tensions. American firms, he says, are increasingly
concerned about international competitiveness, and that means making a very
public show of their efforts to defeat American intelligence-gathering by
installing newer, harder-to-break encryption systems and demonstrating their
distance from the United States government.
The F.B.I., the intelligence agencies and David Cameron,
the British prime minister, have all tried to stop Google, Apple and other
companies from using encryption technology that the firms themselves cannot
break into — meaning they cannot turn over emails or pictures, even if served
with a court order. The firms have vociferously opposed government requests for
such information as an intrusion on the privacy of their customers and a risk
to their businesses.
“In some cases that is driving them to resistance to
Washington,” Mr. Daniel said in an interview. “But it’s not that simple. In
other cases, with what’s going on in China,” where Beijing is insisting that
companies turn over the software that is their lifeblood, “they are very
interested in getting Washington’s help.”
Mr. Daniel’s reference was to Silicon Valley’s argument
that keeping a key to unlocking terrorists’ secret communications, as the
government wants them to do, may sound reasonable in theory, but in fact would
create an opening for others. It would also create a precedent that the
Chinese, among others, could adopt to ensure they can get into American
communications, especially as companies like Alibaba, the Chinese Internet
giant, become a larger force in the American market.
“A stupid approach,” is the assessment of one technology
executive who will be seeing Mr. Obama on Friday, and who asked to speak
anonymously.
That tension — between companies’ insistence that they
cannot install “back doors” or provide “keys” giving access to law enforcement
or intelligence agencies and their desire for Washington’s protection from
foreign nations seeking to exploit those same products — will be the subtext of
the meeting.
That is hardly the only point of contention. A year after
Mr. Obama announced that the government would get out of the business of
maintaining a huge database of every call made inside the United States, but would
instead ask the nation’s telecommunications companies to store that data in
case the government needs it, the companies are slow-walking the effort.
They will not take on the job of “bulk collection” of the
nation’s communications, they say, unless Congress forces them to. And some
executives whisper it will be at a price that may make the National Security
Administration’s once-secret program look like a bargain.
The stated purpose of Friday’s meeting is trying to
prevent the kinds of hackings that have struck millions of credit card holders
at Home Depot and Target. A similar breach revealed the names, Social Security
numbers and other information of about 80 million people insured by Anthem, the
nation’s second-largest health insurer.
Mr. Obama has made online security a major theme, making
the case in his State of the Union address that the huge increase in attacks
during his presidency called for far greater protection. Lisa Monaco, Mr.
Obama’s homeland security adviser, said this week that attacks have increased
fivefold since the president came to office; some, like the Sony Pictures
attack, had a clear political agenda.
The image of Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, shown
in the Sony Pictures comedy “The Interview” has been emblazoned in the minds of
those who downloaded the film. But the one fixed in the minds of many Silicon
Valley executives is the image revealed in photographs and documents released
from the Snowden trove of N.S.A. employees slicing open a box containing a
Cisco Systems server and placing “beacons” in it that could tap into a foreign
computer network. Or the reports of how the N.S.A. intercepted email traffic
moving between Google and Yahoo servers.
“The government is realizing they can’t just blow into
town and let bygones be bygones,” Eric Grosse, Google’s vice president of
security and privacy, said in an interview. “Our business depends on trust. If
you lose it, it takes years to regain.”
When it comes to matters of security, Mr. Grosse said,
“Their mission is clearly different than ours. It’s a source of continuing
tension. It’s not like if they just wait, it will go away.”
And while Silicon Valley executives have made a very
public argument over encryption, they have been fuming quietly over the
government’s use of zero-day flaws. Intelligence agencies are intent on finding
or buying information about those flaws in widely used hardware and software,
and information about the flaws often sells for hundreds of thousands of
dollars on the black market. N.S.A. keeps a potent stockpile, without revealing
the flaws to manufacturers.
Companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter
are fighting back by paying “bug bounties” to friendly hackers who alert them
to serious bugs in their systems so they can be fixed. And last July, Google
took the effort to another level. That month, Mr. Grosse began recruiting some
of the world’s best bug hunters to track down and neuter the very bugs that
intelligence agencies and military contractors have been paying top dollar for
to add to their arsenals.
They called the effort “Project Zero,” Mr. Grosse says,
because the ultimate goal is to bring the number of bugs down to zero. He said
that “Project Zero” would never get the number of bugs down to zero “but we’re
going to get close.”
The White House is expected to make a series of decisions
on encryption in the coming weeks. Silicon Valley executives say encrypting
their products has long been a priority, even before the revelations by Mr.
Snowden, the former N.S.A. analyst, about N.S.A.’s surveillance, and they have
no plans to slow down.
In an interview last month, Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s
chief executive, said the N.S.A. “would have to cart us out in a box” before
the company would provide the government a back door to its products. Apple
recently began encrypting phones and tablets using a scheme that would force
the government to go directly to the user for their information. And
intelligence agencies are bracing for another wave of encryption.
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