11/6/2023 0 Comments Bitmessage iosAnd while privacy proponents are right to point out that the result is better security against all types of hostile actors, Apple’s promise to protect user privacy from an encroaching government is an effective marketing move so long as the government is perceived as a threat. Although technical issues have kept the BitMessage community small, this particular decentralized service is part of a larger movement, one that seeks to address pressing security and privacy concerns by cutting out, or locking out, the weakest link-the middleman service provider.īy deleting itself from the privacy equation altogether, at least when it comes to locally stored data, Apple has-perhaps deliberately-created its own solution to the middleman problem. Consider one especially ingenious secure-email alternative to attract the spotlight after Lavabit’s shutdown: BitMessage is an encrypted messaging protocol that uses no central servers, leaving the government without a party to subpoena (and, thanks to a two-day data-retention policy, without data to seize). This is where the “new” vanishing act comes in. The treaty was heavily criticized by organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union prior to Senate ratification back in 2006 because, among other things, it allows law enforcement to extract user data and subscriber information from Internet service providers without compensating providers for the costs of cooperation. The United States, for example, is one of 42 countries to ratify the Convention on Cybercrime, which requires signatory countries to assist one another’s law enforcement agencies in investigating computer-related offenses. Swiss banks have had no choice but to comply, resulting in a tectonic shift in the world of banking secrecy.Įquivalent legal duties already bind email and Internet service providers the world over. taxpayers whose “behavioral patterns” evidence tax evasion. This is as true for email as it has proven for banking.įor example, in 2012, Switzerland amended its tax treaty with the United States, granting the IRS the power to demand from Swiss banks the names of U.S. The problem is that in an increasingly interconnected world, going offshore does not guarantee limits on the government’s reach. Email services operating out of countries like Switzerland and Sweden attracted a surge of attention last year after Edward Snowden’s service of choice, Lavabit, shut down and its owner advised users not to entrust their private data to companies with physical ties to the United States. In the wake of the Snowden disclosures, however, protecting personal communications from the prying eyes of the government through measures such as offshore encrypted-email accounts is easily understood as a legitimate objective for law-abiding Americans. As metaphor, offshore bank accounts smack of tax evasion and other potentially criminal behavior. The better point of comparison to emerge in recent months is the offshore encrypted-email account. Intelligence officials have actually compared Apple's move to the emergence of Swiss bank accounts, long used to disguise criminal activity. Its decision to lock itself out of its own devices-and by extension, lock out law enforcement-is an improvement on the oldest vanishing act in the book: going offshore. The idea that data shared with service providers should be left bereft of constitutional protections is a perfect example of the kind of archaic thinking that technology is prepared to defeat, even if the law is not.Įnter Apple. This data is safe from warrantless government invasion only if the companies holding your data refuse to comply in the absence of a court order, or Congress has had the good sense to pass a statute explicitly protecting the information. The third-party doctrine stands for the proposition that no constitutional rights attach to metadata voluntarily conveyed to third parties-that includes the phone numbers you dial, the addresses on the outside of your sealed mail, and the checks, deposit slips and purchase activity that make up your bank records. Take the third-party doctrine, the legal foundation of the government’s warrantless metadata collection program-presumably the subject of Apple CEO Tim Cook’s concern when he criticized the government for “err too much on the collect-everything side” in an interview with Charlie Rose last month. Government’s Warrantless Metadata Collection Program By coding a wall between device manufacturer and data, Apple avoids a number of these hurdles-all while taking credit for jumpstarting technology’s response to some of privacy law’s biggest failures. But the law creates significant compliance costs and potential public relations problems for any company that retains the ability to access user data.
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