Tech giants send joint message to US president

Barrack Obama, the president of the United States, has been urged to disapprove backdoors in encryption by well-known figures in IT security, along with advocacy groups and technology firms.

In the open letter, the  signees urged the president to turn down proposals that would give enforcement and intelligent agencies the right to acquire and decrypt information held on smart devices and computers. They said that it would only serve to weaken an already tenuous trust issue between US firms and the general public.

Twitter, Microsoft, LinkedIn, HP, Facebook, Dropbox, Cisco, Apple and Google all put pen to paper on the letter, which read:

“US companies are already struggling to maintain international trust in the wake of revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programmes.

“Introducing mandatory vulnerabilities into American products would further push many customers – be they domestic or international, individual or institutional – to turn away from those compromised products and services.”

After Edward Snowden revealed that tech firms gave vast volumes of data to the NSA, trust declined in the integrity of data. The letter pointed out that backdoors would see customers, as well as criminals, turning to encryption services from foreign providers.

It isn’t only tech giants such as Facebook and Apple that are seeing trust levels from their customers begin to wane. SMEs are also having to justify to their customers why their data is secure, in light of recent breaches making headlines. Businesses are having to pay more attention to their IT security recruitment practices in a bid to strengthen their in-house security, and provide more reasons for their customers to trust them.