For more than a 100 years, the telephone companies have provided
wire-tapping assistance to governments.
For much of this time, this assistance was manual.
Surveillance took place manually and wires were connected by hand.
Calls were recorded to tape.
But as in so many other industries, computing has changed everything.
The telephone companies built surveillance features
into the very core of their networks.
I want that to sink in for a second.
Our telephones and the networks that carry our calls
were wired for surveillance first, first and foremost.
So, what that means is when you're talking to your spouse, your children, a colleague
or your doctor on the telephone, someone could be listening.
Now that someone might be your own government.
It could also be another government, a foreign intelligence service.
Or a hacker, or a criminal, or a stalker, or any other party that breaks
into the surveillance system that hacks into the surveillance system
of the telephone companies.
But, while the telephone companies have built surveillance as a priority,
Silicon Valley companies have not.
And increasingly over the last couple years, Silicon Valley companies have built
strong encryption technology into their communications products that makes
surveillance extremely difficult.
For example, many of you might have an iPhone and if you use an iPhone
to send a text message to other people that have an iPhone, those text messages
cannot easily be wire-tapped.
And in fact, according to Apple they're not able to even see
the text messages themselves.
Likewise, if you use FaceTime to make
an audio call or a video call with one of your friends
or loved ones, that too cannot be easily wire-tapped.
And it's not just Apple.
WhatsApp, which is now owned by Facebook and used by hundreds of millions of people
around the world, also has built strong encryption technology into its product.
Which means that people in the global south can easily communicate without
their governments, often authoritarian, wire-tapping their text messages.
So, after 100 years of being able to listen to any telephone call,
anytime, anywhere.
You might imagine that government officials are not very happy.
And in fact, that's what's happening.
Government officials are extremely mad.
And they're not mad because these encryption
tools are now available.
What upsets them the most, is that the tech companies have built encryption
features into their products and turned them on by default.
It's the default piece that matters.
In short, the tech companies have democratized encryption.
And so, government officials like British Prime Minister David Cameron,
they believe that all communications -- emails, texts, voice calls.
All of these should be available to governments and encryption
is making that difficult.
Now look, I'm extremely sympathetic to their point of view.
We live in a dangerous time, in a dangerous world
and there really are bad people out there.
There are terrorists and other serious national security threats that I suspect
we all want to the FBI and the NSA to monitor.
But those surveillance features come at a cost.
The reason for that, is that there is no such thing as a terrorist laptop,
or a drug dealer's cell phone.
We all use the same communications devices.
What that means, is that if the drug dealer's telephone calls
or the terrorist telephone calls can be intercepted,
then so can the rest of ours too.
And I think we really need to ask, should a billion people around the world be
using devices that are wire-tap friendly?
The scenario of hacking of surveillance systems that I described is not imaginary.
In 2009, the surveillance systems that Google and Microsoft built
into the networks.
The systems that they used to respond to lawful surveillance requests
from the police.
Those systems were compromised by the Chinese government
because the Chinese government wanted to figure out which
of their own agents the US government was monitoring.
By the same token, in 2004 the surveillance system built
into the network of Vodafone Greece -- Greece's largest telephone company
was compromised by unknown entity and that feature, the surveillance feature
was used to wire-tap the Greek Prime Minister and members
of the Greek cabinet.
The foreign government or hackers who did that were never caught.
And really, this gets to the very problem with these surveillance features
or back doors.
When you build a back door into a communications network
or piece of technology, you have no way of controlling
who's going to go through it.
You have no way controlling whether it'll be used by your side
or the other side.
By good guys, or by bad guys.
And so, for that reason, I think that it's better to build networks
to be as secure as possible.
Yes, this means that in the future, encryption is going to make
wire-tapping more difficult.
It means that the police are going to have a tougher time catching bad guys.
But the alternative would mean to live in a world where anyone's calls
or anyone's text messages could be surveilled by criminals,
by stalkers and by foreign intelligence agencies.
And I don't want to live in that kind of world.
And so right now, you probably have the tools to thwart many kinds
of government surveillance already on your phones
and already in your pockets.
You just might not realize how strong and how secure those tools are
or how weak the other ways you've used to communicate really are.
And so, my message to you is this.
We need to use these tools.
We need to secure our telephone calls.
We need to secure our text messages.
I want you to use these tools.
I want you to tell your loved ones.
I want you to tell your colleagues.
Use these encrypted communications tools.
Don't just use them because they're cheap and easy, but use them because
they are secure.
Thank you.
(Applause)