A bunch of people wanted me to ask you about Apple and the situation with Apple and the
FBI.
(Applause.)
You’re trying to persuade the tech community that they should work with government.
But it looks to the tech community -- at least some in the tech community -- that government
is the enemy of the tech community in the way that it’s dealing with Apple.
Some in the tech community.
The question I want to ask you is, putting aside the specifics of this specific case,
the legal fight between the company and the FBI, there are big questions around the idea
of how you balance the need for law enforcement to conduct investigations and the needs of
citizens to protect their privacy.
This is the old privacy versus security debate.
Mr. President, where do you come down on the privacy versus security debate?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, first of all, I can’t comment on the specific case.
So let’s set that aside.
All of us value our privacy, and this is a society that is built on a Constitution and
a Bill of Rights and a healthy skepticism about overreaching government power.
Before smartphones were invented, and to this day, if there is probable cause to think that
you have abducted a child, or that you are engaging in a terrorist plot, or you are guilty
of some serious crime, law enforcement can appear before your -- at your doorstep and
say, we have a warrant to search your home, and they can go into your bedroom and into
your bedroom doors and rifle through your underwear to see if there’s any evidence
of wrongdoing.
And we agree on that, because we recognize that just like all of our other rights -- freedom
of speech, freedom of religion, et cetera -- that there are going to be some constraints
that we impose in order to make sure that we are safe, secure and living in a civilized
society.
Now, technology is evolving so rapidly that new questions are being asked.
And I am of the view that there are very real reasons why we want to make sure that government
cannot just willy-nilly get into everybody’s iPhones that is full of -- or smartphones
that are full of very personal information and very personal data.
And let’s face it, the whole Snowden disclosure episode elevated people’s suspicions of
this.
So does popular culture, by the way, which makes it appear as if I’m in the Sit Room
and I’m moving things -- (laughter) --
Q You’ve been watching Homeland.
THE PRESIDENT: There’s like half a fingerprint and half an hour later, I’m tracking the
guy in the streets of Istanbul.
(Laughter.)
Q It’s not really that cool?
THE PRESIDENT: It turns out it doesn’t work that way.
Sometimes I’m just trying to get a connection.
(Laughter and applause.)
But, look, that was a real issue.
I will say, by the way, that -- and I don’t want to go too far afield -- but the Snowden
issue vastly overstated the dangers to U.S. citizens in terms of spying, because the fact
of the matter is, is that actually our intelligence agencies are pretty scrupulous about U.S.
persons, people on U.S. soil.
What those disclosures did identify were accesses overseas with respect to people who are not
in this country.
A lot of those have been fixed.
Don’t take my word for it.
There was a panel that was constituted, an independent panel that just graded all the
reforms that we set up to avoid those charges.
But I understand that that raised suspicions.
All right.
So we’re concerned about privacy.
We don’t want government to be looking through everybody’s phones, willy-nilly, without
any kind of oversight or probable cause or a clear sense that it’s targeted at somebody
who might be a wrong-doer.
What makes it even more complicated is the fact we also want really strong encryption,
because part of us preventing terrorism, or preventing people from disrupting the financial
system or our air traffic control system or a whole other set of systems that are increasingly
digitalized is that hackers, state or non-state, can just get in there and mess them up.
So we’ve got two values, both of which are important.
Right?
Q Right.
THE PRESIDENT: And the question we now have to ask is, if technologically, it is possible
to make an impenetrable device or system where the encryption is so strong that there’s
no key, there’s no door at all, then how do we apprehend the child pornographer?
How do we solve or disrupt a terrorist plot?
What mechanisms do we have available to even do simple things like tax enforcement?
Because, if, in fact, you can’t crack that at all, government can’t get in, then everybody
is walking around with a Swiss bank account in their pocket -- right?
So there has to be some concession to the need to be able to get into that information
somehow.
Now, what folks who are on the encryption side will argue is any key whatsoever, even
if it starts off as just being directed at one device could end up being used on every
device.
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.
And so the question now becomes, we as a society -- setting aside the specific case between
the FBI and Apple, setting aside the commercial interests, concerns about what could the Chinese
government do with this even if we trusted the U.S. government -- setting aside all those
questions, we’re going to have to make some decisions about how do we balance these respective
risks.
And I’ve got a bunch of smart people sitting there, talking about it, thinking about it.
We have engaged the tech community aggressively to help solve this problem.
My conclusion so far is that you cannot take an absolutist view on this.
So 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.
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.
But I caution -- I am way on the civil liberties side of this thing.
Bill McRaven will tell you that I anguish a lot over the decisions we make in terms
of how to keep this country safe, and 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.
Because we make compromises all the time.
I haven’t flown commercial in a while -- (laughter) -- but my understanding is it’s not great
fun --
Q It’s not great.
It’s not great.
THE PRESIDENT: -- going through security.
But we make the concession because -- it’s a big intrusion on our privacy, but we recognize
it as important.
We have 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.
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.
Because what will happen is if everybody goes to their respective corners and 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.
And then you really will have dangers to our civil liberties because we will have not done
-- the people who understand this best and who care most about privacy and civil liberties
have sort of disengaged or taken a position that is not sustainable for the general public
as a whole over time.