The Lawfare Podcast: Daniel Weitzner and Ben Wittes on Going Dark and the Fallout from Apple v. FBI
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 14 April 2016
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Apple and the FBI may have been settled out of court, but that doesn’t mean the fight is over. With Congress on the verge of considering new legislation to compel technology companies to decrypt data, the Going Dark debate is alive and well.
Last week on a panel at the IAPP Global Privacy Summit in Washington D.C., Lawfare's Editor-in-Chief Ben Wittes and Daniel Weitzner discussed the fallout from the battle between Apple and the FBI and what is likely to come of the Going Dark debate. Weitzner is the Director of the MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative and Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab; he was formerly the United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Internet Policy at the White House. He and Ben parse the contours of the recent dispute between the Bureau and the technology giant, explore the boundaries of commercial use encryption, and debate the role of backdoors in law enforcement investigations. They conclude with thoughts on the policy implications of the latest reemergence of the cryptowars.
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Transcript
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| 0:18.0 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, |
| 0:22.0 | rational security, chatter, law fair no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:30.0 | As I said earlier, I think part of the reason we're in this, |
| 0:34.0 | a lot of the sort of sharp-edged choices we're in, |
| 0:39.0 | because people don't feel a sense of confidence that we can be nimble here, |
| 0:44.0 | that we have institutions that can manage the complexity of these environments. |
| 0:48.0 | And I think that it's really a lesson, frankly, for law enforcement |
| 0:53.0 | and national security agencies around the world, |
| 0:55.0 | that if they want to be trusted with these tools, |
| 0:57.0 | that do have real risk associated with them, |
| 1:00.0 | they're going to have to show that they can function with a real sense of transparency and accountability. |
| 1:05.0 | I give the NSA a lot of credit for taking steps in that direction. |
| 1:08.0 | I think you see similar kind of things happening in the UK. |
| 1:13.0 | You see, hopefully, the rest of Europe will catch up as well. |
| 1:17.0 | But I think that if law enforcement wants to be trusted, |
| 1:21.0 | it can't always be in the mode of pushing the law |
| 1:25.0 | to the maximum possible extent, |
| 1:28.0 | because that doesn't make people feel good. |
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