Yesterday I finished reading A Higher Loyalty, the book written by former FBI director James Comey.
I did manage to resist the temptation to jump ahead to the juicy bits, and my patience was rewarded: a lot of what he says about his interactions with President Trump and his administration are a lot more meaningful when placed into the context of what comes before. Especially the contrast with his relationship – or lack of it – with the Obama administration.
But it was the brief section dealing with the FBI’s infamous battle with Apple which stood out for me …
Comey starts by explaining the lens through which he viewed the whole issue of encryption:
He said that he looked at Apple’s standpoint from the view of someone who had spent a year watching ‘our legal capabilities diminish.’
He wrote about the different viewpoints we touched on yesterday – a dark view of the world versus a sunny one.
He said those opposing perspectives were why he thought that neither the FBI nor Apple should be able to decide the issue – it should be decided by ‘the American people’ through their elected representatives. His personal view, though, was that privacy is not an absolute.
He said that then-President Obama saw both sides of the issue, and personally led an initiative into how the conflict between privacy and security could be best resolved. He suggests that the administration even got as far as a potential solution – but weren’t able to pursue it further before the end of Obama’s term.
It’s hard to see what this ‘technical plan’ might have been. The point has always been that any weakness created for use by the good guys will inevitably fall into the hands of the bad guys. Tools leak. Vulnerabilities are discovered and exploited.
But while I personally come down on the side of privacy and Benjamin Franklin – ‘Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety’ – the perspective given by Comey is a valuable one, I think. Comey strikes me as a man who acknowledged both sides of the argument and tried to do what he felt was the right thing.
The book is definitely worth a read.
Photo: Reuters/Carlos Barria
