Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Dropbox and others reinforce their position against the backdoor suggested by the FBI

You may never have heard of Reform Government Surveillance, but its undeniable importance: it is a coalition of technology companies that include Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Dropbox and many others, and aim to fight for the integrity of operating systems and online services in the face of pressure from legal agencies the United States, with its routine pressure for unlimited access to user data and files.

Now, the group is launching yet another statement reinforcing its position defending the privacy and integrity of users' data, especially regarding the encryption of this information. The statement was motivated by the news that the FBI and the Department of Justice (Department of Justice, or DoJ) in the US would be preparing a new series of proposals for companies to create backdoors on your systems and platforms, allowing government agencies to circumvent security measures and encryption keys in order to have access to citizens' information, which, obviously, must be private.

More precisely, the FBI would be interested in a technology that would generate a special key for them and other government agencies whenever a device or data set was encrypted; such a key would be kept locally in a separate place for use only when necessary. The problem, of course, would be that we have no idea what the FBI considers "necessary", not to mention the possibility that such a tool could fall into the wrong hands and cause an unprecedented global security disaster.

In response to the actions, the group released the following statement:

Reform Government Surveillance recently announced a new basic encryption principle that will guide our support efforts, and we continue to believe that strong encryption helps protect the security and privacy of individuals and businesses around the world. We have consistently raised questions about proposals that would undermine the effectiveness of device and service encryption by requiring so-called “special access” for outside the law. Recent reports describe that the new proposals suggest the creation of vulnerabilities in devices and services but they appear to suffer from the same technical and design problems that security researchers have been identifying for years. Decreasing the security and privacy brought by encryption is not the answer.

, certainly this fight will still looooonge

via 9to5Mac