"Riana Pfefferkorn, the cryptography fellow at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society, told BuzzFeed News that responsible disclosures can enable companies like Apple to “to alert their users, come up with a fix, and push it out to their users through software updates.” But from the Justice Department’s perspective, a successful security patch can also represent the loss of a law enforcement tool. “The key thing is that Apple can’t fix what they don’t know about, so the DOJ wouldn’t lose this method if they keep it secret,” Pfefferkorn said.
But Pfefferkorn believes the tradeoff works in favor of disclosure. Keeping the method secret would mean leaving everyone’s devices less secure, she said, “so that law enforcement potentially can get access in some instances to some mobile devices used by the tiny percentage of the population who are criminals.”"
- Date Published:03/31/2016
- Original Publication:BuzzFeed News