How to avoid surveillance ... with the phone in your pocket

For more than a 100 years,
the telephone companies have provided

wire-tapping assistance
to governments.

For much of this time,
this assistance was manual.

Surveillance took place manually
and wires were connected by hand.

Calls were recorded to tape.

But as in so many other industries,
computing has changed everything.

The telephone companies
built surveillance features

into the very core of their networks.

I want that to sink in for a second.

Our telephones and the networks
that carry our calls

were wired for surveillance first,
first and foremost.

So, what that means is when you're talking
to your spouse, your children, a colleague

or your doctor on the telephone,
someone could be listening.

Now that someone might
be your own government.

It could also be another government,
a foreign intelligence service.

Or a hacker, or a criminal, or a stalker,
or any other party that breaks

into the surveillance system that hacks
into the surveillance system

of the telephone companies.

But, while the telephone companies have
built surveillance as a priority,

Silicon Valley companies have not.

And increasingly over the last couple
years, Silicon Valley companies have built

strong encryption technology into their
communications products that makes

surveillance extremely difficult.

For example, many of you might have
an iPhone and if you use an iPhone

to send a text message to other people
that have an iPhone, those text messages

cannot easily be wire-tapped.

And in fact, according to Apple
they're not able to even see

the text messages themselves.

Likewise, if you use
FaceTime to make

an audio call or a video call
with one of your friends

or loved ones, that too
cannot be easily wire-tapped.

And it's not just Apple.

WhatsApp, which is now owned by Facebook
and used by hundreds of millions of people

around the world, also has built strong
encryption technology into its product.

Which means that people in the global
south can easily communicate without

their governments, often authoritarian,
wire-tapping their text messages.

So, after 100 years of being able
to listen to any telephone call,

anytime, anywhere.

You might imagine that government
officials are not very happy.

And in fact, that's
what's happening.

Government officials
are extremely mad.

And they're not mad
because these encryption

tools are now available.

What upsets them the most, is that
the tech companies have built encryption

features into their products
and turned them on by default.

It's the default piece that matters.

In short, the tech companies have
democratized encryption.

And so, government officials like British
Prime Minister David Cameron,

they believe that all communications
-- emails, texts, voice calls.

All of these should be available
to governments and encryption

is making that difficult.

Now look, I'm extremely sympathetic
to their point of view.

We live in a dangerous time,
in a dangerous world

and there really are
bad people out there.

There are terrorists and other serious
national security threats that I suspect

we all want to the FBI
and the NSA to monitor.

But those surveillance
features come at a cost.

The reason for that, is that there is no
such thing as a terrorist laptop,

or a drug dealer's cell phone.

We all use the same
communications devices.

What that means, is that if the drug
dealer's telephone calls

or the terrorist telephone calls
can be intercepted,

then so can the rest
of ours too.

And I think we really need to ask, should
a billion people around the world be

using devices that
are wire-tap friendly?

The scenario of hacking of surveillance
systems that I described is not imaginary.

In 2009, the surveillance systems
that Google and Microsoft built

into the networks.

The systems that they used to respond
to lawful surveillance requests

from the police.

Those systems were compromised
by the Chinese government

because the Chinese government
wanted to figure out which of their own

agents the US government
was monitoring.

By the same token, in 2004
the surveillance system built

into the network of Vodafone Greece
-- Greece's largest telephone company

was compromised by unknown entity
and that feature, the surveillance feature

was used to wire-tap the Greek
Prime Minister and members

of the Greek cabinet.

The foreign government or hackers
who did that were never caught.

And really, this gets to the very problem
with these surveillance features

or back doors.

When you build a back door into
a communications network

or piece of technology,you
have no way of controlling

who's going to go through it.

You have no way controlling whether
it'll be used by your side

or the other side.

By good guys,
or by bad guys.

And so, for that reason, I think
that it's better to build networks

to be as secure as possible.

Yes, this means that in the future,
encryption is going to make

wire-tapping more difficult.

It means that the police are going to have
a tougher time catching bad guys.

But the alternative would mean to live
in a world where anyone's calls

or anyone's text messages could
be surveilled by criminals,

by stalkers and by foreign
intelligence agencies.

And I don't want to live
in that kind of world.

And so right now, you probably have
the tools to thwart many kinds

of government surveillance
already on your phones

and already in your pockets.

You just might not realize how strong
and how secure those tools are

or how weak the other ways you've used
to communicate really are.

And so, my message
to you is this.

We need to use
these tools.

We need to secure our telephone calls.

We need to secure
our text messages.

I want you to use
these tools.

I want you to tell
your loved ones.

I want you to tell
your colleagues.

Use these encrypted
communications tools.

Don't just use them because they're cheap
and easy, but use them because

they are secure.

Thank you.

(Applause)