We should be nervous when the most profitable company in the world takes a principled stance against the most powerful government in the world. Apple released a statement today (they call it a “letter” to their customers) which states that the FBI has requested that they provide a backdoor to the iPhone’s operating system and they are refusing to give it to them. This is huge because If there is any sort of consistent observation across decades and genres of social theory it is that as organizations get bigger they tend to treat the rest of the world as a potential threat to their own interests. War criminal and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger summed it up nicely: “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.” The same can be said for Apple, China, General Motors, Russia, and Amazon. As a company or empire grows its stability relies on more and more factors and so the tendency is to bring those things into the fold either by buying them, colonizing them, or some indiscernible combination of the two. If Apple and the United States federal government are at loggerheads about data privacy it means that something big and fairly stable has ended. When powerful actors disagree, it usually heralds a major shift in one party’s conception of what is politically viable. Is that what just happened?

Last summer I wrote about the reactionary politics of hacking. There I argued that while most hackers (according to their own public pronouncements and the published research on these communities) are somewhere between anarcho-socialist and libertarian in their personal politics, their aggregate effect on the world may be promoting a security state. I wrote:

the hacker and the bureaucrat are polar opposites in terms of means –the former is trickster incarnate while the latter plots along as predictably as humanly possible– but they advocate for similar solutions to difficult problems. Even though the bureaucrat seeks and fosters smooth operation of a system, and hackers are motivated by a goal and are animated by chaotic destruction, they both share a fundamental distrust of humans as political entities. Hackers may embody the opposite of bureaucracy, but they ultimately desire the same thing as bureaucrats: technologies that obviate trust.

Encryption is only as important as one’s belief that there are bad actors waiting in the wings to do harm. The important thing for us to consider here is that both Apple CEO Tim Cook and the whistleblower Edward Snowden both seem to heartily believe that such bad actors are out there and encryption is necessary for digital life. Such uniformity of belief across such a presumably wide political spectrum –from corporate CEO to enemy of the state—has to mean at least one of these three things is true:

• Encryption is so obviously important that even people with huge ideological disagreements can at least agree that it is necessary.
• Snowden and Cook are actually not that ideologically different or they are similar in an as-of-yet-undefined political coalition. That is, we might not have a word for the persistent and predictable opinions that Snowden, Cook, and maybe all people in those positions hold. In other words, they look further apart ideologically than they really are because we’re looking at them from the wrong perspective.
• The United States government is so far afield from what makes for a sane argument about encryption and data privacy that really different people can be on the same opposing side.

I suspect most people would waffle between 1 and 3, and maybe even say that those statements are synonymous: that the government is so greedy for power or narrowly focused on its objectives that it has lost sight of the obvious risks associated with breaking encryption. I tend to believe that 1 and 3 are true today but 2 is most important of all. There is a new political common sense forming and its borders are peculiar. They circumscribe a really broad group of people and interests that all converge on the importance of the individual’s ability to have absolute control of their data within the confines of the laws that do not immediately endanger that data sovereignty. Your data is yours and yours alone with few exceptions.

In most instances the logic above is sound, but if today tells us anything, it is that this logic has been borne out of defensive posturing, not creative thinking about the kind of society we want to live in. The arguments for encryption are being forged in the heat of reaction, not the light of creativity. So while I agree with Apple (and Snowden) in this instance, I worry that we are building a reactionary political program that can be wielded easily by powerful actors, not a radical one that confronts the underlying abuses of power that individuals face on a daily basis. Apple is right that encryption backdoors today mean deeply broken and insecure networks tomorrow, however we should reject the premise that we will always live in a world where this will be the case.

Cook is fond of using home security as a metaphor for data security. In today’s letter he said a backdoor to encryption “would be the equivalent of a master key, capable of opening hundreds of millions of locks — from restaurants and banks to stores and homes. No reasonable person would find that acceptable.” At an electronic privacy conference last fall Cook said something similar: “If you put a key under the mat for the cops, a burglar can find it, too.” He concluded by warning that if bad guys “know there’s a key hidden somewhere, they won’t stop until they find it.”

It is obviously important that, in the mean time, we have sufficient locks on our doors, but focusing on locking ourselves away seems more in line with an over-stepping government than a free society. If big organizations like governments and corporations only have interests, we should be focused on the project of making it against their interest to want access to our data and our homes. To do so requires radical thinking –by definition, thinking that gets at the root of problems—not reactionary thinking that is characterized by short term, stop-gap measures fueled by fear and anger.

If we look at calls for encryption as reactionary, not progressive or radical, the disagreement between Apple and the government looks much different than how I characterized it in the beginning of this essay. Instead of a foundation-shaking change in how the government operates, we are seeing a reactionary movement that, like many reactionary movements, creates single-issue coalitions. It may have the long-term effect of making us less free, if we are constantly preoccupied with building better locks rather than better communities. Encryption may be tactically useful for preserving individual liberties now, but we should be concerned about where it will leave us in years to come.

David is on Twitter.

Header image by Karol Franks