Obama advocates for government access to smartphones at SXSW

President Obama
(Image credit: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for SXSW)

Private citizens' smartphones should be accessible to the government, President Obama said in his South by Southwest keynote Friday, Variety reports. To want total privacy on the devices, he suggested, is "fetishizing."

"How do we disrupt a terrorist plot? What mechanisms do we have available to do even simple things like tax enforcement?" he said. "There has to be some concessions to get into that information."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
Explore More
Julie Kliegman

Julie Kliegman is a freelance writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in BuzzFeed, Vox, Mental Floss, Paste, the Tampa Bay Times and PolitiFact. Her cats can do somersaults.