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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 mendax on Wednesday August 12 2015, @07:05AM
The bullshit spewed by bastards like Cyrus Vance, Jr., et al. makes my blood boil.
Marginal benefits? The ability to protect oneself from the actions of a government that has been shown time and again to willfully, unlawfully, and with no regard for the civil rights or privacy of the People it is supposed to be protecting and serving I find to be of great benefit.
The government wants us to force us to reveal to it the encryption keys we use to protect our data, to trust it to keep it safe from others,and we are supposed to believe that it won't misuse that trust or not screw up and give all the keys to the Chinese or the Russians? The government has amply demonstrated that it cannot be trusted. Mr. Vance, et al. just will never get it. The revelations thanks to the bravery of Edward Snowden and others who have and not yet been revealed indicate that the U.S. government has permanently forfeited any legitimacy with regard to this issue.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.