John Oliver Explains Why You Should Side With Apple Over The FBI Better Than Most Journalists

You had to know this was coming eventually, but the latest John Oliver main story was his take on the Apple v. FBI encryption fight. If you haven’t seen it yet, here it is:

Not surprisingly, Oliver’s take is much clearer and much more accurate than many mainstream press reports on the issues in the case, appropriately mocking the many law enforcement officials who seem to think that, just because Apple employs smart engineers, they can somehow do the impossible and "safely" create a backdoor into an encrypted iPhone that won’t have dangerous consequences. He even spends a bit of time reviewing the original Crypto Wars over the Clipper Chip and highlights cryptographer Matt Blaze’s contribution in ending those wars by showing that the Clipper Chip could be hacked.

But the biggest contribution to the debate — which I hope that people pay most attention to — is the point that Oliver made in the end with his faux Apple commercial. Earlier in the piece, Oliver noted that this belief among law enforcement that Apple engineers can somehow magically do what they want is at least partially Apple’s own fault, with its somewhat overstated marketing. So, Oliver’s team made a "more realistic" Apple commercial which noted that Apple is constantly fighting security cracks and vulnerabilities and is consistently just half a step ahead of hackers with malicious intent (and, in many cases, half a step behind them).

This is the key point: Building secure products is very, very difficult and even the most secure products have security vulnerabilities in them that need to be constantly watched and patched. And what the government is doing here is not only asking Apple to not patch a security vulnerability that it has found, but actively forcing Apple to make a new vulnerability and then effectively forcing Apple to keep it open. For all the talk of how Apple can just create the backdoor just this once and throw it away, this more like asking Apple to set off a bomb that blows the back off all houses in a city, and then saying, "okay, just throw away the bomb after you set it off."

Hopefully, as in cases like net neutrality, Oliver’s piece does it’s job in informing the public what’s really going on.

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