Speaking at the SXSW conference, President Obama fielded some brief questions about the Silicon Valley encryption fight with lawmakers in Congress. While refusing to specifically address the Apple versus FBI matter centered around the San Bernardino shooting, the President suggests that a compromise should be reached now, warning that "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 are dangerous and not thought through"
President Obama stated in the interview that "My conclusion so far is you cannot take an absolutist view own this," Obama said. "If your argument is strong encryption no matter what, and we can and should in fact create black boxes, that I think does not strike the kind of balance we have lived with for 200, 300 years."
The President believes that the unlockable encryption currently on Google and Apple phones are "fetishizing our phones above every other value. That can't be the right answer." He added that "I suspect 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, on a subset of issues we deem is important." No specific answers were given on how to execute this or decide who gets to decide what's important, but the President does admit that the conversation is a difficult one to strike a balance on.
Obama points to the Snowden revelations as the starting point, which raised the hackles of the American public. Speaking about the National Security Agency's metadata collection, and other programs, Obama said that ""I understand that that raised suspicions," but claims that "we're concerned about privacy. We don't want [law enforcement] to be poking through people's phones willy-nilly."
Top