Will Congress force tech companies to hand over user data?

After Apple CEO Tim Cook again reiterated his company’s opposition to including backdoors for government surveillance on U.S. citizens in its products, it looks like surveillance hawks in Congress are looking for ways to force tech companies to cooperate with government spying.

Cook, during a recent interview with “60 Minutes,” suggested that weakening encryption for digital communications would do little to improve American security, while making it easier for criminals to steal users’ data.

“On your smartphone today, on your iPhone, there’s likely health information; there’s financial information,” Cook said. “There are intimate conversations with your family, or your co-workers. There’s (sic) probably business secrets, and you should have the ability to protect it. And the only way we know how to do that is to encrypt it. Why is that? It’s because if there’s a way to get in, then somebody will find the way in. There have been people that suggest that we should have a backdoor. But the reality is if you put a backdoor in, that backdoor’s for everybody, for good guys and bad guys.”

The tech CEO said politicians are wrong to suggest that Americans should have to give up communications privacy for security against potential terror attacks.

“We’re America. We should have both,” he said.

But members of Congress who have been pressuring the tech industry to weaken encryption standards remain unmoved by Cook’s warnings.

According to Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), American privacy and free speech in digital communications leaves too much room for criminal activity that the government can’t stop.

“As a society, we don’t allow phone companies to design their systems to avoid lawful, court-ordered searches,” Cotton said.

“If we apply a different legal standard to companies like Apple, Google and Facebook, we can expect them to become the preferred messaging services of child pornographers, drug traffickers and terrorists alike — which neither these companies nor law enforcement want.”

“Our society needs to address this urgent challenge now before more lives are lost or shattered,” he added.

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