Reform Government Surveillance is a coalition of major tech companies that looks to guide legislation for how the government can surveil individuals and access their information. Apple joined RGS back in 2013 and the coalition has recently issued a statement as talks have begun again about US officials pushing for a mandate to make tech companies build backdoors into their devices and services.
Spotted by ZDNet, the new statement from the coalition reiterates the strong stance that Apple and others have shared consistently in recent years against creating backdoors to devices and services. This comes after the coalition detailed its new core principle on encryption last week.
Reform Government Surveillance recently announced a new core principle on encryption that will guide our advocacy efforts, and we continue to believe that strong encryption helps protect the security and privacy of individuals and companies around the world. We have consistently raised concerns about proposals that would undermine encryption of devices and services by requiring so-called “exceptional access” for law enforcement. Recent reports have described new proposals to engineer vulnerabilities into devices and services – but they appear to suffer from the same technical and design concerns that security researchers have identified for years. Weakening the security and privacy that encryption helps provide is not the answer.
Along with Apple, other RGS members include: Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Dropbox, Evernote, and more.
Just last month, Apple’s VP of software engineering, Craig Federighi spoke out and shared the Apple’s stance hasn’t changed.
“Proposals that involve giving the keys to customers’ device data to anyone but the customer inject new and dangerous weaknesses into product security,” he said in a statement.
Federighi went further to explain that these weaknesses would create many issues, particularly when looking at how they could impact businesses and infrastructure like power grids and transportation systems.
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