Memo to Apple: Don’t lawyer up–mensch up

Twenty-one years ago, before I had a computer and beepers were all the rage, I launched a new project at the Simon Wiesenthal Center-Digital Hate. Back in 1995, there was one hate website—the white supremacist, stormfront.org. Like most other Americans, I had no clue how the Internet worked or how it would come to reshape our lives, but I knew something about hate and the bigots who purveyed the poison. We monitored some of the groups and saw that they were flocking online—sensing that here was a new marketing tool, with no censorship, no fact checker, no librarian. If it was important to bigots it became important to us.

On September 12, 2001 we changed the name to Digital Terrorism and Hate. Ever since, we tracked two parallel and occasionally overlapping universes—the online postings of “traditional” hate groups, like the KKK and neo-Nazis and the burgeoning online activities of terrorists. Each year we would release a DVD with a selection of a few hundred of the tens of thousands of toxic online presentations, starting with newsgroups, websites, discussion groups, and hate games targeting every minority. Later, YouTube and social media giants including Facebook and Twitter would come to dominate.

Along the way, we reached out to the companies, with a plea to:

1. Set transparent rules on hate postings and make real people, not avatars available to respond to the public when complaints were submitted.

2. Be proactive. It wasn’t enough to merely remove the problematic postings or online recipes for pressure cooker bombs. Put some of the young collective creative genius that is the calling card of Silicon Valley to create digital tripwires that could identify and block repeat offenders.

Facebook has been the most responsive, though with over 1.5 billion pages, their record is far from perfect. Google and YouTube have upgraded their efforts. And now, after Paris and San Bernadino, Twitter, long the propaganda weapon of choice of terrorists, has recently removed 125 thousand accounts and there are strong indications they will help degrade the terrorists’ manipulation of their social media platform. They have a big job ahead of them. Last month, a House Homeland Security hearing was told that ISIS posted on average 200,000 tweets a day!

Which brings us to the indefensible refusal of Apple to help the FBI access information locked within an iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernadino mass murderers. To the best of my knowledge, there is no legal or moral basis to protecting the right of terrorists -dead or alive- to encrypt their murderous schemes. Yes, there is reason to worry about backdoor abuses by the likes of NSA or MI5; but there is also the obligation of companies not to gift those who plot mass attacks around the world with the cloak of secrecy that could cripple real-time anti-terror efforts by democratic governments.

But all of today’s technology powerhouses prove every day that there is always a creative technological answer whenever their market share is challenged. It would behoove Silicon Valley Inc. to come up with a system that would provide a temporary key for law enforcement to view encrypted data in suspected terrorists’ files, provided they do so legally. That is exactly what the FBI has done in the terrorist iPhone investigation. Apple, instead of lawyering up, should mensch up and work with other companies to help solve this clear and present danger.

 For now, the sophisticated terrorist evildoers know they have the upper hand. Here is a quote from one of the terrorists’ latest online magazine, Al Risalah:

“Just as a Mujahid does not enter the battlefield without his Iman (faith) and his weapon, you must not exchange correspondence without encryption.”

I just returned from meetings at the European Union and the Ministry of Interior in France. After the Paris butcheries, authorities there and across Europe remain on high alert. They have made no secret that to keep their citizens safe, they will do what it takes, including new laws and economic leverage against companies who won’t cooperate. Here at home, Sens. Corker (R-Tenn.) and Feinstein (D-Calif.) are pressuring for rules to deal with the upgraded capabilities which unencumbered encryption provides for terrorists. 

Our safety, our liberties, our democratic values, would be best safeguarded if Apple and its Silicon Valley neighbors, provide the technological answers, before the politicians on both sides of the Atlantic invoke their own solutions.

Cooper is the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and founder of its Digital Terrorism and Hate Project.