SecDef to Silicon Valley: Can’t We Just be Friends?

SAN FRANCISCO — With Apple and the Justice Department slugging it out over the company’s right to encrypt its products, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter would very much like Silicon Valley to believe the Pentagon’s chief egghead is on their side.

A particle physicist by training who cut his teeth in the Pentagon’s acquisition shop, Carter came to the RSA Conference on Wednesday bearing a surprisingly conciliatory message — one at odds with the U.S. government’s legal action against Apple. “I’m not a believer in backdoors,” Carter said to a round of applause.

On the heels of a court order compelling Apple to help the FBI unlock an iPhone belonging to one of the shooters in the December terrorist attack in San Bernardino, relations between Washington and Silicon Valley have chilled. Technologists accuse the Justice Department of forcing Apple to undermine the security of its own products, a move that they argue could compromise the privacy of millions of Apple users — not to mention set a legal precedent allowing the FBI to unlock other phones down the road.

In a Q&A with Ted Schlein, a legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Carter said the Apple case should not be used as a precedent in future investigations to access encrypted communications. “I don’t think we ought to let one case drive a general conclusion or solution,” Carter said.

Carter’s overture to the tech industry also included two new proposals meant to strengthen the Pentagon’s relationship with Silicon Valley.

The first initiative — dubbed “Hack the Pentagon” — will invite a group of hackers to penetrate the Defense Department’s public web pages. The hackers, who will be vetted and subject to background checks, will be offered a bounty to find security vulnerabilities in the Pentagon’s web infrastructure. Carter called the initiative, set to launch in April, an attempt to “think outside the five-sided box that is the Pentagon.”

Carter also announced the formation of the Defense Innovation Advisory Board, which will charge up to 12 individuals with “advising the department on areas that are deeply familiar to Silicon Valley companies, such as rapid prototyping, iterative product development, complex data analysis in business decision making, the use of mobile and cloud applications, and organizational information sharing,” according to a Pentagon statement. The initiative will be led by Alphabet — née Google — Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt.

With some 30,000 security professionals and a who’s-who list of tech and security firms in attendance, senior Obama administration officials have descended this week on the RSA Conference to mend relations with Silicon Valley. Yet they have shown no sign of backing down in their fight with Apple: Both National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers and Attorney General Loretta Lynch exhorted the tech community to come to a compromise solution on encryption but gave no indication as to what such a solution might entail.

Carter repeated that mantra Wednesday, saying that Washington and Silicon Valley must work together to solve the problem. “We have to innovate our way to a sensible result,” he said.

Officials say terror groups and ordinary criminals alike have increasingly embraced encrypted communication tools, making it more difficult for the government to prevent attacks and carry out investigations. Rogers has said that the Islamic State gunmen who carried out a series of attacks in Paris in November used encrypted communication tools, and suggested the technology had prevented his agency from stopping the attack.

The Obama administration has abandoned efforts to seek legislation compelling tech companies to provide access to encrypted communications. Instead, it is trying to force Apple to provide such aid through the courts.

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