GoKawiilI’m coming down from spending a few days at Usenix Security, right here in Baltimore. This means that my days have been taken up with two kinds of conversation: first, explaining to colleagues why Baltimore isn’t actually like The Wire. And second: trying not to talk about AI.
Here I’m going to break both of those rules.
I have many worries about what AI means for our field, for various definitions of “field”. But in this post I want to focus on just one thing I’ve started worrying about, and it’s a perverse thing: specifically, I’m worried that AI is going to make software much too secure.
While that doesn’t sound so bad on the surface, there’s a consequence to this. I mean something very specific: I’m concerned that U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies are about to go dark, meaning lose a huge portion of their capability. And that this isn’t going to be simply a problem for those agencies, but also for those of us who value computer security and privacy in general.
Going Dark, and the era of law enforcement hacking
To explain how we got here, we need to talk about recent history. Here we have a real excuse to reference The Wire, which embeds a realistic snapshot of what electronic surveillance looked like in 2002. The cops in that show are after payphones and burners, all used for voice calls. While the mobile phones were new, nothing in here would have surprised a cop from 1989.
Less than a decade later, everything was different.
The change started in the late 2000s with the rise of smartphones and texting. In 2010, Apple began encrypting iPhone data using a key derived from the user’s passcode, and Google followed behind them. In 2011, Apple deployed end-to-end encrypted text messaging. By 2014, WhatsApp had 600 million users worldwide, and by 2016 nearly a billion — and they were all using end-to-end encrypted messaging. The chart below gives a snapshot of how quickly the world changed between The Wire era and 2016:
The FBI and law enforcement agencies noticed the trend and took it very seriously. In 2014, Director Comey announced an initiative called Going Dark, which would launch a “national conversation” about what providers could do — or be compelled to do — to make these new communications media legible to law enforcement and counterintelligence.
In 2016, the agency stopped talking. When a terrorist attack left the FBI with the shooter’s locked iPhone, the agency ordered Apple to give them access. The company refused. What broke the stalemate — and, to some extent, ended “Going Dark” itself — was something that neither the FBI nor Apple expected. An outside company announced that there was no need for Apple’s assistance: they could simply hack the phone.
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