His comment makes sense to 99% on non-tech people, and if it was possible it would make sense to all. Would we want to open Bin Laden's iPhone?
He wants you to have your home with 100 locks, guard dogs and armed guards. BUT if a court orders you, you have to let the police in to check x, y and z. Now I don't think that a secret key can be somewhere and stay safe for a long time. It will be leaked or hacked. This places hundreds of million innocent people at extreme danger of having everything personal revealed.
So, IMO, giving the cops a master key opening all our doors "if needed" doesn't work. TSA does that, but presumably while cameras are running, and this is stuff we know it will be searched. So encryption is the best option.
It's insane to see this comment downvoted. Hey HN: this guy/gal is agreeing with you! To punish them for not participating in your willful misunderstanding of this argument is intellectually bankrupt, and toxic to your cause.
That's not true; it doesn't make sense to me even if it were possible to guarantee proper handling. The risk of the government abusing it's power in a completely legal way is greater than some crimes going unsolved because documents remain secret.
What matters to me is the power imbalance; with few exceptions whatever the government can do, normal people should be able to do to.
100000000000000% wrong. Store a file from your offshore account--showing that you avoided $1.78b in taxes--at home and IRS can raid it at any time with a court order. The same applies to all your documents, papers.
The 4th amendment doesn't mean you can do every illegal thing in the world and never fear the state...simply the state cannot engage in fishing expeditions. If 5 kids are reported missing from your neighborhood, and a day later you have a backhoe digging on your backyard, be ready to answer a few questions--that may lead to other questions and warrants.
>>The risk of the government abusing it's power in a completely legal way
No such thing in a western /democratic society. After you go all the levels, you must obey. Sometimes it sucks, but...
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. Well, actually I do know, and the answer sucks and it's frustrating.
But you're right -- in an ideal world, pretty much nobody would design a future where the worst of humanity can hide behind encryption to avoid accountability.
The problem is that, with the current set of technologies that we have right now, we either give the cops (effectively) the ability to get everything on everyone, limited only by their discretion (ha!), or we give them nothing, and we give guys like Osama Bin Laden and Richard Spencer a place to hide.
One of my biggest fears is that, if we give the voting public only these two options, then eventually they're going to side with Officer Friendly over Bin Laden and Spencer.
Ultimately, it's going to be up to us as technologists to figure out something better.
It's kind of alarming how easily you can throw Osama Bin Ladin (a guy who killed thousands of innocent Americans), with Richard Spencer who _says_ fucked up things. Richard Spencer (just like the Westboro Baptist Church) is probably a complete douchebag nutjob. But to so casually equate saying douchey things with the murder of thousands... that's exactly what leads to Officer Friendly getting more powers over every day, innocent citizens.
Look at Russia and China. They're literally doing what you're suggesting by using thought crimes to justify massive surveillance and censorship of every forum and network to "protect society" from bad thoughts and damaging their "way of life".
The very rights that allowed the civil rights movement to exist, are the ones you guys are casually trying to destroy. Daring to have an opinion the majority finds revolting. Freedom of Speech is literally a protection of minorities from the majority. Those in power don't need protection.
[edit] 1 minute in, and yep, this is going down as I expected. Have a great day. =D
You're right - I picked Spencer because he's an easy target, especially on a board that generally leans to the Left. If there's some incident of racial violence that somehow traces back to him, I doubt the typical HN reader would object to the FBI getting a warrant to search his house or his car.
And I suspect that most here wouldn't mind them getting a warrant for his phone under the same circumstances, if they can just bring themselves to admit it.
> The very rights that allowed the civil rights movement to exist
I think I see what you're saying here, but encryption wasn't really around in MLK's day.
> are the ones you guys are casually trying to destroy.
Whoa there, please don't lump me in with the authoritarians, especially the new Leftist flavor that's so popular lately.
The case that I'm trying to make in this thread is that we've got to find a better balance that protects minority voices (like MLK, or Ben Shapiro, or Milo Yanawhatshisname or whoever Berkeley is rioting about this week) in a cryptographically strong way, while still allowing for some sort of accountability in extreme cases.
If we fail at this - or worse, if we can't be bothered to try - then I'm afraid we're going to wind up stuck with something crappy like key escrow, and then the thought police are really going to have a field day.
But again you've made the same error. The locks can be opened and the phone retrieved. iPhones are not indestructible, you can access any part of them if you want.
And do what with an encrypted one? They want the contents, not the phone. Frankly, they might even return it after making a copy of it /fingerprints etc.. Spend $1m on a zero day for each case? What if they run out of zero-days?
Marvel at the encrypted data that they have full access to, and feel free to attempt to brute-force decrypt it, just like any other hostile attacker. The job of the encryption system is to prevent unauthorized access, from the perspective of the owner of the data. If it fails to do that job, it's broken and should be replaced by a system that isn't.
He wants you to have your home with 100 locks, guard dogs and armed guards. BUT if a court orders you, you have to let the police in to check x, y and z. Now I don't think that a secret key can be somewhere and stay safe for a long time. It will be leaked or hacked. This places hundreds of million innocent people at extreme danger of having everything personal revealed.
So, IMO, giving the cops a master key opening all our doors "if needed" doesn't work. TSA does that, but presumably while cameras are running, and this is stuff we know it will be searched. So encryption is the best option.