-
For more than 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 that
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
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 dealers' telephone calls
-
or the terrorists' 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?
-
So the scenario of hacking of surveillance
systems that I've described --
-
this is not imaginary.
-
In 2009,
-
the surveillance systems that Google
and Microsoft built into their networks --
-
the systems that they use 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 an 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 of 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're secure.
-
Thank you.
-
(Applause)