Kevin Mitnick Quotes

This is not a case about one isolated iPhone. Rather, this case is about the Department of Justice and the FBI seeking through the courts a dangerous power that Congress and the American people have withheld: the ability to force companies like Apple to undermine the basic security and privacy interests of hundreds of millions of individuals around the globe. The government demands that Apple create a back door to defeat the encryption on the iPhone, making its user’s most confidential and personal information vulnerable to hackers, identify thieves, hostile foreign agents, and unwarranted government surveillance.

The director of the FBI has been visiting Silicon Valley companies asking them to build back doors so that it can spy on what is being said online. The Department of Commerce is going after piracy. At home, the American government wants anything but Internet freedom.

Efforts to constrain encryption through forms of extraordinary access will inevitably introduce vulnerabilities into the security of consumer products in ways that are likely to have adverse long-term effects on the security, privacy, and civil liberties of citizens.

We have some material on spying by a major government on the tech industry. Industrial espionage.

Well, take the evolution of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It began as hackers' rights. Then it became general civil liberties of everybody - government stay away.

I want my government to do something about my privacy - I don't want to just do it on my own.

We don’t have to choose between preserving privacy and preventing terrorism. We do have to decide how much oversight and accountability there should be when the government conducts surveillance on its citizens.

What is to stop the government from demanding that Apple write code to turn on the microphone [of a user's iPhone] in aid of government surveillance, activate the video camera, surreptitiously record conversations, or turn on location services to track the phone’s user? Nothing.

It's very hard to keep an uncrackable encryption if you share it with the government.

On the question of information security, he claims that, in a Trump Administration, the U.S. government will not spy on its own citizens. If true, this would represent a turn away from the strong language that he has used about identifying terrorists on our soil.

The political solutions proposed against encryption are not going to work against terrorism.

I haven't seen - I haven't heard the arguments that would make that case. And I haven't seen a proposal yet that satisfies the objections. The problem is, you create a key like this, and it can't - it's hard to say that it's going to be hidden. And then it becomes used both by our government in multiple cases, but also it could get out as far as hackers are concerned or other countries.

I think that has a lot of dangers, as does government surveillance, which is way too high.

I believe there's something out there watching over us. Unfortunately, it's the government

It doesn’t keep us safe and it doesn’t keep us free if we give up our liberties to the government.

.. the amount of sensitive information held within the national security apparatus is immensely larger than it was a generation ago. Technological change has caused an explosion in the rate of information production within government agencies, as everywhere else.

Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers. Seems like you can scare any public into allowing the government to do anything with those four.

In our view, the current storage by the government of bulk meta-data creates potential risks to public trust, personal privacy, and civil liberty.

One can doubt the sincerity of the technology community’s outrage over the NSA’s surveillance practices—doubt, for example, that the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose company reportedly stores petabytes’ worth of data about its billion-plus active monthly users, was shocked at the thought of mass data collection.

Historically our government—the FBI for example—has not always earned that trust.

[The FBI v. Apple Case] threatens a radical transformation of the relationship between the government and the governed.

Some call for efforts to weaken or compromise encryption standards such that only Governments may enjoy access to encrypted communications. However, compromised encryption cannot be kept secret from those with the skill to find and exploit the weak points, whether State or non-State, legitimate or criminal. It is a seemingly universal position among technologists that there is no special access that can be made available only to government authorities, even ones that, in principle, have the public interest in mind. In the contemporary technological environment, intentionally compromising encryption, even for arguably legitimate purposes, weakens everyone’s security online.

Apple and Google want to create encryption for which they could not provide you the key. Their business model will not survive if the American government has a special relationship with them that requires them to surrender this kind of information.

Really, what the government is asking Apple to do is to make every individual who uses an iPhone susceptible to hacking by bad people, foreign governments, and anyone who wants.

A back door is a nonstarter. It means we are all not safe... I don't support a back door for any government, ever.