In response to the Lawful Access to Encrypted Data (LAED) Act proposed by three Republican senators, Big Tech companies have registered their opposition through their Reform Government Surveillance coalition. They said that building encryption backdoors would jeopardize the sensitive data of billions of users and “leave all Americans, businesses, and government agencies dangerously exposed to cyber threats from criminals and foreign adversaries”. They also pointed out that as the pandemic has forced everyone to rely on the internet “in critical ways”, digital security is paramount and strong encryption is the way forward. The coalition’s members are Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Snap Inc., Verizon Media, Dropbox, and Microsoft-owned LinkedIn. The coalition was established in December 2013, a few months after documents about the United States’ PRISM data collection program were leaked. This is not the first time Big Tech have resisted American government’s calls to undermine encryption. In 2016, Apple refused to assist the FBI in breaking into the iPhone used by one of the San Bernadino shooters, saying that building a backdoor to its encrypted products would undermine the privacy of all its users. FBI eventually managed to get into the phone by exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in the software to bypass its ten-try limitation, Washington Post had reported. Earlier this year too, Apple refused to assist the FBI in breaking into two iPhones of the Saudi gunman who was involved in a shooting at an American naval base in Pensacola (Florida). This time too, FBI found a way…
