Government Backdoors and Data Privacy

Data privacy and security is becoming an overwhelmingly important problem in this digital age.  Target, a major retailer, had credit card data stolen from 40 million accounts in 2013.  Now, in 2016, the government is asking Apple to open a backdoor to their phones so the FBI can access a terrorist’s cell phone.  So without a doubt, it’s an important issue.

Is it just to ask Apple to make their platform intrinsically less secure?  Would that open up Apple users to a credit card hack on the order of Target’s crisis?

Some argue that the firmware the FBI is asking for would only be for use by the US Government.  Which is a fair point to make.  However, the mere existence of such a tool would make the software platform less secure in my opinion.

James Comey, the Director of the FBI, had a lot to say on the topic.  He agrees that encryption is important, stating: “The development and robust adoption of strong encryption is a key tool to secure commerce and trade, safeguard private information, promote free expression and association, and strengthen cyber security.”  He also says that he thinks it’s important to safeguard privacy for the American people, regardless of the communication medium.  However, he ultimately thinks that there should be a third party judge who should determine when those rights to privacy have been given up by the party in question.  Of course, the shooting in San Bernardino qualifies.

I have no issue with the FBI asking for access to the shooter’s phone.  What I do have an issue with, is forcing Apple to develop software to invalidate the security of their users and their products.

Three writers from The Guardian also covered the story.  They quote Julian Sanchez, a surveillance law expert at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute in Washington, who stated: “The law operates on precedent, so the fundamental question here isn’t whether the FBI gets access to this particular phone, it’s whether a catch-all law from 1789 can be used to effectively conscript technology companies into producing hacking tools and spyware for the government.”

I think it is important to clarify that this is not a fight over just one event.  This is a fight over setting a precedent, as Sanchez noted, and a fight over creating tools with extreme power for misuse.

One of the most abhorrent circumstances surrounding this event is that there is little legislation that was written with these kinds of technologies in mind.  We are daily racing to create better encryption methods, and we are racing against very intelligent people working to break down the latest release of that encryption.  The legal system can’t keep up, and the people in power to legislate are hardly educated on the technologies to the extent which they could make a properly informed decision.

So if we can’t answer very specific questions regarding encryption methodologies and requested backdoors, can we turn somewhere for more general insight into previous laws, that we might attempt to infer the spirit of the law?  Perhaps we should turn to the Supreme Court.

As the late Justice Antonin Scalia once said, “There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all.”

Diversity in Tech Companies

Diversity is an interesting and important topic, and I’ll be writing about the topic as it presents itself in tech companies in the United States.  We live in a world that hails from a time when cisgender, heterosexual, educated, wealthy, white males were explicitly and implicitly the dominant segment of the population.  There were countless structures put in place that assumed these individuals as the predominant and assumed citizen.  These structures still exist today, both in our legislation and in our minds (not-so-fun fact that I discovered while writing this: my web browser doesn’t even acknowledge that cisgender is a word).

In Silicon Valley, diversity is professed to be at the forefront of recruiting desires, and yet the reality is that there is very little in terms of diversity in tech.

Tech companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars towards diversity efforts, but it’s simply not enough.  Google released diversity data two years ago, and the results are shocking: in tech globally, 17% of Google employees are women, and in tech in the U.S., 1% of Google employees are Black.  I applaud Google for the movement towards transparency; this is not easy data to report, especially when the numbers are so grim, but it is important for people to see the problem so that we can all be focused on solving it.

So once we’ve admitted that there’s a problem, we need to identify the causes.  To my mind, there are two primary causes, and they are both intangible.

First, and this perhaps pertains more to ethnic diversity, there is a culture in many tech companies that caters to white men.  Vauhini Vara reports the experience of many from diverse backgrounds entering tech companies in Silicon Valley, and they all seemed to be saying the same thing: there is an overwhelming culture of privilege (e.g. “I’ve been coding since I was seven”) that makes tech companies difficult to get into, and taxing to stay in.  Erica Joy writes about her feeling an overwhelming pressure to succumb to the whitewashed masses in a tech company, and didn’t even realize how much happier she could be in a more diverse environment until she switched companies.  There have also been many stories where tech employees from diverse backgrounds have been presumed to be custodial or administrative workers, simply because they didn’t fit the stereotype.  So there are considerable barriers to entering and remaining in a tech company if you do not fit the stereotypical description of who has worked in these companies in the past (read: white males).

Second, and this perhaps pertains more to gender diversity, there is a branding issue that is introduced well before candidates apply for an interview.  Eileen Pollack posits that what really keeps women out of tech is that we describe and think about science, computer science, and programming in images and terms that are classically associated with males.  For example, we tend to think that computer nerds like Star Wars.  There is some support for this, as women were joining the computer science field at the same rate as they were joining medicine, law, and physics… until the personal computer came into play – which is presumably when we started to fabricate these stereotypes of what it meant to be a computer geek.

So in order to fix these problems, we need to un-whitewash and de-gender technology: both as an intellectual pursuit and as a corporate endeavor.  Harvey Mudd found success in increasing the percentage of women computer science students by re-branding the degree to more female-friendly.  Code 2040 is providing tech fellowships only for Hispanic and Black applicants.  These are both viable, sustainable solutions to a problem that has been plaguing the technology sector for some time.

The structures that provide access to the American Dream were built by white males, for white males.  I’m glad that we are starting to tackle this tremendously difficult problem as a nation, but we’ve still got a long way to go.