Apple’s chief executive has sharply criticised surveillance powers proposed by the British government, warning that allowing spies a backdoor route into citizens’ communications could have “very dire consequences”. Questioning a key element of the draft investigatory powers bill, which places a new legal obligation on companies to assist in these operations to bypass encryption, Tim Cook insisted that companies had to be able to encrypt in order to protect people.
Speaking during a visit to the UK, he said that halting or weakening encryption would hurt “the good people” rather than those who want to do bad things, who “know where to go”.
“You can just look around and see all the data breaches that are going on. These things are becoming more frequent,” Cook told the Daily Telegraph. “They can not only result in privacy breaches but also security issues. We believe very strongly in end-to-end encryption and no back doors. We don’t think people want us to read their messages. We don’t feel we have the right to read their emails. “Any back door is a back door for everyone. Everybody wants to crack down on terrorists. Everybody wants to be secure. The question is how. Opening a back door can have very dire consequences.”
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ORIGINAL SOURCE: The Guardian
