(REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque) Apple CEO Tim Cook listens to U.S. President Barack Obama speak at the Summit on Cybersecurity and Consumer Protection at Stanford University in Palo Alta, California February 13, 2015.

Apple CEO Tim Cook at a Monday award ceremony reaffirmed his support for strong encryption, TechCrunch reports, slamming law-enforcement plans to undermine it as "incredibly dangerous."

Cook's pro-privacy speech came just days after Facebook introduced support for the technology on its social network for the first time.

Strong encryption has become a contentious issue and a source of rising tensions between the US government and the tech community.

The term refers to data masked in such a way that it cannot be understood by anyone who does not have the correct key to decrypt it. It can help internet users keep their sensitive communications safe online, but some people believe it poses a potential security risk, as it cannot be decrypted by authorities even with a search warrant.

Following revelations by exiled whistle-blower Edward Snowden over the past few years of mass government surveillance, big tech companies have increasingly incorporated strong encryption into their products.

(The Guardian) Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's disclosures have sparked unprecedented interest in privacy issues.

Apple has previously taken a strong stance on the issue, with Cook writing in an open letter to customers that the company had "never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services ... And we never will." It's a position that is frustrating law enforcement. When Apple announced it would implement strong encryption on its iOS mobile operating system, for example, one senior US police officer said the iPhone would "become the phone of choice for the pedophile."

Speaking at an event hosted by Washington nonprofit EPIC honoring him for "corporate leadership" on Monday, Cook rejected this analysis emphatically. "Like many of you, we at Apple reject the idea that our customers should have to make tradeoffs between privacy and security," the CEO said. "We can, and we must provide both in equal measure. We believe that people have a fundamental right to privacy. The American people demand it, the Constitution demands it, morality demands it."

The US government is pleading with tech companies to move away from strong encryption. President Obama hasn't called for an outright ban, but he wants to be able to track communications when possible. "When we have the ability to track [online communication] in a way that is legal, conforms with due process, rule of law, and presents oversight, then that's a capability we have to preserve," he said in January. FBI director James Comey has slammed companies like Apple for using the tech, contending that they are aiding "bad guys" by doing so.