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from the gettin-the-camel's-nose-under-the-tent dept.
AG Barr seeks 'legislative solution' to make companies unlock phones:
ACLU Senior Staff Attorney Brett Max Kaufman responded to [US Attorney General] Barr's comments, saying "Every time there's a traumatic event requiring investigation into digital devices, the Justice Department loudly claims that it needs backdoors to encryption, and then quietly announces it actually found a way to access information without threatening the security and privacy of the entire world. The boy who cried wolf has nothing on the agency that cried encryption." While Barr's push for backdoors and cooperation from phone manufacturers raises concerns, Kaufman's response doesn't address that the DoJ isn't seeking the ability to unlock phones, but to do so as quickly as possible.
Apple's refusal to work with law enforcement has been an issue for years. The company wants to ensure its users feel confident in trusting Apple with their data, yet police and the FBI say that the refusals to cooperate hinder investigations and put lives at risk. It sounds like Barr wants to put a system into law that would oblige Apple to comply in future cases. How realistic this plan is -- or how much buy-in from politicians it will get -- remains to be seen, though it would force Apple to rethink how it approaches user privacy.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 19 2020, @09:27PM (1 child)
Cooperating puts lives at risk, so the true statement that not cooperating puts lives at risk isn't persuasive by itself. Making weak security increases the number of dissidents murdered by authoritarian regimes. Including dissidents working to further US national security interests by leaking information that is useful to American interests about things like the abuses of Uighurs in China, or the regime in Iran. It also endangers women who have stalkers, and countless other categories. See, the "think of the children" game is easy to play, and I can play it just as well as Barr.
The only thing that matters is the net tradeoffs and weighing cost/benefit. Privacy is vital to functioning democracy and basic liberties. It always has been. We've always had the ability to speak privately to our friends and colleagues without the government listening in and getting a transcript of every conversation. And that hasn't changed just because my conversations are more likely to happen over a chat app than over a pint at the tavern these days. Having private conversations isn't some new menace -- it's the way things have always been, and it needs to be preserved. Barr is an authoritarian asshole who is offended by the people not having to fall in line with his ideology, and we have to fight men like him tooth and nail.
Posting as anonymous coward, because I can.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday May 19 2020, @10:39PM
But there is a fundamental shift... In the days of the Founding Fathers, a conversation over a pint at a tavern included, at most, a half dozen or so friends (unless you're shouting loud enough for the whole pub to hear, defeating the idea of privacy), and these people geographically intersected at the time of the conversation. The metadata: who was sitting at your table, was relatively public record, and the information exchanged in that conversation could only travel away from the meeting at a limited speed. Something as large as blueprints for a battleship couldn't be covertly carried or exchanged. Over the last 150 years, technology has been boiling that frog of limited information diffusion to the point that today I can post messages in a widely read public forum (NOT SN!) where thousands of people a minute read it. That message may have a cryptographic component that instantly, secretly, reaches thousands of interested people all over the globe (Jedi Order 66, or whatever...) This is fundamentally different than a guy on a horse looking at lamps in a tower then riding through town after town shouting "The British are Coming!"
Yes, we should have privacy. There are vetted, open source apps you can install on your phone if you feel the need to have private conversations - I wholeheartedly encourage EVERYONE to do this, because if only a few do it, then the very act of having that private conversation is going to make certain people think you are up to something. Expecting that your phone, as delivered, does anything to protect your privacy is naive and delusional.
As is any trust you place in the AC feature of SN - it's better than nothing, but are you accessing via TOR? If so, you're probably on a watchlist already...
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