The New York Times features a joint (and very one sided) opinion piece by prosecutors from Manhattan, Paris, London and Spain, in which they decry the default use by Apple and Google of full disk encryption in their latest smartphone OSes. They talk about the murder scene of a father of six, where an iPhone 6 and a Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge were found.
An Illinois state judge issued a warrant ordering Apple and Google to unlock the phones and share with authorities any data therein that could potentially solve the murder. Apple and Google replied, in essence, that they could not — because they did not know the user's passcode. The homicide remains unsolved. The killer remains at large.
Except, there is no proof that having such a backdoor would conclusively allow them to solve the case and wouldn't require actual police work.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Wednesday August 12 2015, @08:29AM
In other news, if the authorities would have a complete record of where everyone was and what they did at any instant in time, then there would never be a question who did it, at we could just look it up in the database. Does that justify the total surveillance state, with every corner of the world (including the private corners) being covered by cameras and microphones?
If your answer if no, then you have just admitted that being able to solve crimes is not the highest value, and therefore it is not sufficient as argument that a fundamental right needs to be restricted.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.