By Chris Welch
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson doesn't think Apple CEO Tim Cook should be making long-term decisions around encryption that could ripple across the technology industry. "I don't think it is Silicon Valley's decision to make about whether encryption is the right thing to do," he told The Wall Street Journal in an interview on Wednesday. "I understand Tim Cook's decision, but I don't think it's his decision to make," said Stephenson. "I personally think that this is an issue that should be decided by the American people and Congress, not by companies."
Cook has repeatedly argued there's no feasible way for Apple to create a "backdoor" that would help law enforcement circumvent the encryption on iPhones that protects consumer data, since such an opening could also be exploited by malicious users.
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It's-not-paranoia-if-they-are-really-out-to-get-you department ...
I'm not surprised that AT&T, which is, in its capacity as an ISP, able to tie emails to individual senders and receivers, is opposed to encryption.
No zealot like a convert, as they say: having lagged the market by several years, I suspect that the company is doing everything it can to extract every possible mill of revenue from its customers, and selling communications intelligence appears to be at the head of its list of new revenue streams.
The firm's disdain for encryption is not just applicable to AT&T's own customers, either: the company is a carrier for many other firms, and has access to all the backbones which it rents to major ISPs and upper-tier carriers, and I think they also want to spy on that traffic while it's going past, in much the same way that the earlier incarnation of "Ma Bell" allowed the NSA privileged access to the pipes years ago.
As with the firm's opposition to "net neutrality", so it goes with encryption: I'm afraid that the AT&T brass want to avoid any hint of a "public utility" obligation to keep their nose out of my business. It is, AFAICT, no longer acceptable to just get paid for carrying the bits from point A to point B: I think they want to read my mail and sell the keywords to all comers.
YMMV.
Bill