The head of GCHQ, the UK’s electronic eavesdropping agency, has moved to defuse the row between security services and technology companies with a call for “very practical co-operation”.
Robert Hannigan’s speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Monday came ahead of a proposed new public-private forum in the UK, set to be announced by the prime minister this summer, designed to avoid stand-offs such as the US government’s legal fight with Apple.
Silicon Valley companies and law enforcement officials have become increasingly at odds, as the advance of tech features such as encryption has created growing frustration among investigators at their inability to track or control criminals and terrorists online.
Mr Hannigan said that the debate over cyber security and privacy should not obsess over “backdoors or front doors. It is about whether entry into the house is lawful at all.”
When he took on his new role as director of GCHQ in November 2014, Mr Hannigan provoked a backlash from tech companies by saying internet services such as Facebook and Twitter had become the “command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals”, in a Financial Times opinion piece.
On Monday, Mr Hannigan said the comments caused a “bigger stir than I expected” and called for a “new relationship” between tech companies and government agencies.
“We should be bridging the divide, sharing ideas and building constructive dialogue in a less highly-charged atmosphere,” he said, adding that it was for “elected representatives to decide the parameters of what is acceptable”, not tech companies, law enforcement officers or intelligence officials.
“The price of security can be too high,” he said, while adding: “The security tail should not wag the dog.”
Mr Hannigan’s remarks come just days after many of the largest companies in Silicon Valley joined Apple’s side in its court battle against the US government, as FBI investigators try to break into an iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters.
The GCHQ director said he did not want to ban encryption but said — without naming Apple directly — that some tech companies had confused what was already a “highly charged” debate by using inflammatory language.
“I am puzzled by the caricatures in the current debate, where almost every attempt to tackle the misuse of encryption by criminals and terrorists is seen as a ‘backdoor’,” he said. “It is an overused metaphor, or at least misapplied in many cases.”
Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has repeatedly referred to the FBI’s push to have iPhone engineers create new software that would enable investigators to break into the shooter’s device by bypassing its passcode as a backdoor.
“It’s not just Apple” that uses that phrase, Mr Hannigan said in an interview with the FT following the MIT speech. “You can often address the problem [of obtaining information from a secured device] without creating a vulnerability for other people.”
Despite protests from Apple and other Silicon Valley companies about the UK’s proposed Investigatory Powers bill, Mr Hannigan told the FT that he believed the tone of the debate was different in the US. “It feels like a different atmosphere over here,” he said. “It seems to me in the UK that companies and government are working pretty well together actually.”
Mr Hannigan used his speech to trail a new initiative that David Cameron, UK prime minister, plans to launch this summer to “facilitate this dialogue” between government and industry. He told the FT that Mr Cameron hoped to convene an “open ended” forum that would avoid a “confrontational process”, such as the FBI’s battle with Apple in the courts, and recognise that the technology is “going to keep changing”.
Changes to bolster the encryption in smartphones and online messaging apps had helped to improve the UK’s overall level of cyber security, Mr Hannigan said, even as new challenges have emerged. There was now “really good day-to-day co-operation on difficult day-to-day threats” between government and the tech industry since his FT article of 2014.
“It’s been a good dialogue over the last couple of years but it needs to go further now,” he said. “I’m trying to reach out [to tech companies] in this speech and say, ‘Within a legal framework, can we work together?’”
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