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For more than a 100 years,
the telephone companies have provided
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wire-tapping assistance
to governments.
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For much of this time,
this assistance was manual.
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Surveillance took place manually
and wires were connected by hand.
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Calls were recorded to tape.
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But as in so many other industries,
computing has changed everything.
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The telephone companies
built surveillance features
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into the very core of their networks.
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I want that to sink in for a second.
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Our telephones and the networks
that carry our calls
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were wired for surveillance first,
first and foremost.
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So, what that means is when you're talking
to your spouse, your children, a colleague
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or your doctor on the telephone,
someone could be listening.
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Now that someone might
be your own government.
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It could also be another government,
a foreign intelligence service.
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Or a hacker, or a criminal, or a stalker,
or any other party that breaks
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into the surveillance system that hacks
into the surveillance system
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of the telephone companies.
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But, while the telephone companies have
built surveillance as a priority,
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Silicon Valley companies have not.
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And increasingly over the last couple
years, Silicon Valley companies have built
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strong encryption technology into their
communications products that makes
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surveillance extremely difficult.
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For example, many of you might have
an iPhone and if you use an iPhone
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to send a text message to other people
that have an iPhone, those text messages
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cannot easily be wire-tapped.
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And in fact, according to Apple
they're not able to even see
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the text messages themselves.
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Likewise, if you use
FaceTime to make
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an audio call or a video call
with one of your friends
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or loved ones, that too
cannot be easily wire-tapped.
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And it's not just Apple.
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WhatsApp, which is now owned by Facebook
and used by hundreds of millions of people
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around the world, also has built strong
encryption technology into its product.
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Which means that people in the global
south can easily communicate without
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their governments, often authoritarian,
wire-tapping their text messages.
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So, after 100 years of being able
to listen to any telephone call,
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anytime, anywhere.
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You might imagine that government
officials are not very happy.
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And in fact, that's
what's happening.
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Government officials
are extremely mad.
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And they're not mad
because these encryption
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tools are now available.
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What upsets them the most, is that
the tech companies have built encryption
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features into their products
and turned them on by default.
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It's the default piece that matters.
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In short, the tech companies have
democratized encryption.
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And so, government officials like British
Prime Minister David Cameron,
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they believe that all communications
-- emails, texts, voice calls.
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All of these should be available
to governments and encryption
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is making that difficult.
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Now look, I'm extremely sympathetic
to their point of view.
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We live in a dangerous time,
in a dangerous world
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and there really are
bad people out there.
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There are terrorists and other serious
national security threats that I suspect
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we all want to the FBI
and the NSA to monitor.
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But those surveillance
features come at a cost.
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The reason for that, is that there is no
such thing as a terrorist laptop,
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or a drug dealer's cell phone.
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We all use the same
communications devices.
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What that means, is that if the drug
dealer's telephone calls
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or the terrorist telephone calls
can be intercepted,
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then so can the rest
of ours too.
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And I think we really need to ask, should
a billion people around the world be
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using devices that
are wire-tap friendly?
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The scenario of hacking of surveillance
systems that I described is not imaginary.
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In 2009, the surveillance systems
that Google and Microsoft built
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into the networks.
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The systems that they used to respond
to lawful surveillance requests
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from the police.
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Those systems were compromised
by the Chinese government
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because the Chinese government
wanted to figure out which
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of their own agents the US
government was monitoring.
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By the same token, in 2004
the surveillance system built
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into the network of Vodafone Greece
-- Greece's largest telephone company
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was compromised by unknown entity
and that feature, the surveillance feature
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was used to wire-tap the Greek
Prime Minister and members
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of the Greek cabinet.
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The foreign government or hackers
who did that were never caught.
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And really, this gets to the very problem
with these surveillance features
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or back doors.
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When you build a back door into
a communications network
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or piece of technology, you
have no way of controlling
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who's going to go through it.
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You have no way controlling whether
it'll be used by your side
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or the other side.
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By good guys,
or by bad guys.
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And so, for that reason, I think
that it's better to build networks
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to be as secure as possible.
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Yes, this means that in the future,
encryption is going to make
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wire-tapping more difficult.
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It means that the police are going to have
a tougher time catching bad guys.
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But the alternative would mean to live
in a world where anyone's calls
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or anyone's text messages could
be surveilled by criminals,
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by stalkers and by foreign
intelligence agencies.
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And I don't want to live
in that kind of world.
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And so right now, you probably have
the tools to thwart many kinds
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of government surveillance
already on your phones
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and already in your pockets.
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You just might not realize how strong
and how secure those tools are
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or how weak the other ways you've used
to communicate really are.
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And so, my message
to you is this.
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We need to use
these tools.
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We need to secure our telephone calls.
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We need to secure
our text messages.
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I want you to use these tools.
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I want you to tell
your loved ones.
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I want you to tell
your colleagues.
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Use these encrypted
communications tools.
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Don't just use them because they're cheap
and easy, but use them because
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they are secure.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)