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from the prosecutors-want-access-to-everything dept.
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 Anal Pumpernickel on Wednesday August 12 2015, @05:13AM
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.
That's a lesser reason to object to this. The real problem is that the idea that citizens should (or be forced to) live their lives in such a way as to make the jobs of people in the government easier is an inherently authoritarian notion, and a laughable one in a country that is supposed to be 'the land of the free and the home of the brave'. It should be the other way around: The government should fear The People.
Banning strong encryption would be completely unconstitutional, as it would conflict with not only the first and fourth amendments, but the government simply does not have authority to do so even without taking those into account. A warrant only allows the government to make the attempt to get what they want; it is not mandatory that they succeed. They cannot force everyone to communicate in such a way that the government can always break the encryption just so they can supposedly solve crimes. It is nonsense to say that because they have a warrant, they should be guaranteed success. That is simply not the purpose of the fourth amendment or the constitution, and it violates the principles to which this country is supposed to aspire.
If I had to choose between more crime or more privacy and freedom, I would choose more crime. Freedom can carry many risks, and I would rather take those risks than live like a coward. But I don't believe there is such a dichotomy in most cases.