>Various government agencies are crooning that they should be able to knock down whichever doors they please because they're the government.
I think this analogy is apt but it actually works against the author's point. Our government has legally been allowed to knock down whichever door it has wanted to for centuries assuming it has received the proper warrants. An encryption door cannot be knocked down. That is a very scary problem for the government and law enforcement. Things like personal notes, journals, communications all used to be accessible to the government through warrants. Now that information is all locked away behind encryption. This is a huge shift in the way governments fight crime. We need to recognize that fact in order to have any productive debate with anti-encryption folks and we can't just pretend the government is evil because they wanted to keep the status quo of the physical world alive into the digital era.
> >Various government agencies are crooning that they should be able to knock down whichever doors they please because they're the government.
> I think this analogy is apt but it actually works against the author's point. Our government has legally been allowed to knock down whichever door it has wanted to for centuries assuming it has received the proper warrants. An encryption door cannot be knocked down. That is a very scary problem for the government and law enforcement. Things like personal notes, journals, communications all used to be accessible to the government through warrants. Now that information is all locked away behind encryption.
Well, there was nothing stopping someone from writing their journals or notes in code so nobody could understand them. There is a question of whether someone would be forced to explain the code used for the notes. But the current scheme would be akin to the government requiring schools to spread misinformation about how to make a secure cipher and making it illegal to write a book about how to make a secure cipher without making the cipher broken.
This is a huge shift in how we think about information and learning. There appears to be a general mystery about software as though technology has changed our underlying morals. It hasn't. If you reframe moral questions about software as moral questions about other things, the answers become more obvious. For example, the morals behind free software become immediately obvious if you consider mathematics or even things like blueprints (since a software program is both the design and implementation in a way).
Of course there's the danger of a false parallel (and you might argue that I've drawn such a parallel), but I think my argument holds.
>Our government has legally been allowed to knock down whichever door it has wanted to for centuries assuming it has received the proper warrants.
But it hasn't been able to trawl for evidence mechanically and automatically. Now it has the technology to do that.
The default has always been privacy, for practical reasons. Encryption simply continues that tradition by continuing to make evidence gathering non-trivial.
The mechanical and automatic nature of evidence gathering is a real difference, and goes well to argue against NSA-style warrantless crawling.
I think for warrants, though, we're looking at a different beast. By their nature they are targeted. And people have been compelled to provide passwords in the court of law(See [0]). The right against self-incrimination is relatively narrow, so as to not hinder the government's discoverability powers too much.
I think the one thing about this, though, is that people can already be compelled through legal means to unlock things. There is a reading of the Apple case that they are being compelled to unlock something for which they have the key.
Generally, it feels like outlawing encryption isn't necessary for the gov't to pursue the discovery phase of an arrest. There are already a good amount of legal means to compel people to unlock the doors.
> people can already be compelled through legal means to unlock things.
Things that they own, yes. But Apple doesn't own the iPhone that the FBI wants to unlock.
> There is a reading of the Apple case that they are being compelled to unlock something for which they have the key.
No, they don't have the key. What the FBI is asking Apple to do is to redesign the lock so that the FBI can try as many different keys as it wants until they find one that unlocks it.
> And people have been compelled to provide passwords in the court of law
You can have encrypted data that accept two different passwords, producing different decrypted data of your choice. This is like the 2nd code that mute the home security alarm when you are forced to do it, but still calls the police.
Duress codes and embassy grade encryption are an interesting topic. Attempting to address the real world implications of "rubber hose cryptanalysis" is increasing important.
Wiretap warrants aren't practical, nor were they the default; they are the result of years of public discussion and legal battles.
I agree that the situation is changing; the technology to batch surveil everyone at once is new, but the argument over privacy and where governments bounds are isn't.
> Now that information is all locked away behind encryption.
Moreover, more and more of that persistent information is casual communication that historically would have been securely erased by the whispering winds of time. No judge can grant investigators a time machine to travel back and spy on thousands of conversations over the last 5 years to fish for evidence. But now they can have the next-best thing (and getting better).
I think the discussion will get more useful when we'll stop talking about them and instead will talk about us. In civilized countries, the government represents the people. Law-enforcing organisms are mandated by people. The question is not whether some stranger wants to be able to enforce the law: the problem is whether we want to be able to enforce the law.
You are 100% correct, the US is not a Democracy. IT'S A REPUBLIC.
The same citizens complaining that the rich control our country are the same citizens who don't register to vote because their opinion doesn't matter. The person who screams the loudest is the person heard. And the voice of America takes a sad me me me view that their voice doesn't matter, thus the rich get the power.
I'm far from a Sanders supporter, but his way of running this campaign has given America their Voice back. Ban super PACS, and limit corporate contributions to the same dollar amount that you and I are limited to donating, $2700.
Naturally we want to be able to enforce the law. We should also remember the 20th century and how quickly "they" seized control of Germany, Italy, Japan, China, Korea, the Soviet republics, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua, Cuba, the list goes on. All of that without the benefit of universal surveillance and time scrying technology.
In pursuit of enforcing the law, we need to be vigilant in maintaining the rule of law, which has proved difficult over the last century, with dire consequences.
I think the problem is that while the consequences of encryption on society has enough pros and cons to be gray, the sides that people choose are not at all gray. One side wants a backdoor and the other side doesn't. There's absolutely no way to draw a compromise on that. What does meeting down the middle between these two sides even mean? Law enforcement will always want as much power and legal protection as possible. It's the people who may or may not yield. It's the people who are going to budge on this issue.
I also think that the effect sizes on the pro vs. con debate of encryption has been overblown, and that it will be many years before we get a body of literature on which to anchor claims of magnitudes in our debate.
That being said, I think that leading the discussion on anti-encryption with discussions of terrorism and child porn is dishonest on its face. They're dishonestly exaggerated in effect size, and terrorism is the worse of the bunch, as the war on terror has costed mountains more than terrorism itself, both in money and in life. Unfortunately, these are often the top discussion points for any encryption debate.
I feel part of the problem is that people recognize what you say, and understand its helpful, even necessary for government to have warranted access. The big BUT however is many of us are losing trust in our governments around the world as digital collection and access has been systematically abused in almost every major developed nation.
Until governments can return confidence in their actions and motivations Avoid an even low chance 1984 scenario is more important than making law enforcement/counter terrorism do their jobs the old fashion way.
So if some stalker has been spying on your children over their web cam, but you/they never find out no one was damaged? If a tree falls in the woods...
In practice, if I never know, no one has been damaged. Furthermore, if the FBI has been watching over the stalker and they arrest him as soon as he approaches my house, that's good!
> Things like personal notes, journals, communications all used to be accessible to the government through warrants. Now that information is all locked away behind encryption.
The government already has plenty of ways to collect evidence through legal means. A judge can compel you to provide access to your company files, to unlock your home, to decrypt your computer, etc. If you don't comply with the discovery process, you can be held in contempt of court. Encryption doesn't change anything in that equation.
The difference here is that the person in question is dead, so he can't provide the password. So the FBI wants to set a precedent that they can obtain information they want through means that would normally not be available to them.
People die all the time after committing nefarious crimes. In this case the police killed them. Maybe the police is to blame for the fact that we can not get to the truth about the crime. If there is any truth to be found, other than disillusioned religious people go on a murderous rampage all on their own. I mean justice, well in many cases there can't be justice. The long arm of the law can't reach everyone anywhere, especially after death.
Brain communication interfaces aren't that far off though, so maybe we can solve this "problem" with the our minds being dark to the FBI in a decade or two.
A smartphone and the network services that power it have way more information then any personal journal ever did. It has every one you're associated with, every topic you're interested in, everywhere you've been, etc. Society did not fall apart back when the government did not have access to the complete life record of every potential criminal.
You talk about centuries, in the mid 19th century only 10% of the world could even read or write. The vast majority of what governments want to access would have previously been said face to face without any records.
Things like personal notes, journals, communications all used to be accessible to the government through warrants. Now that information is all locked away behind encryption. This is a huge shift in the way governments fight crime.
They only think that information is locked away behind encryption. There is no proof that the information they seek actually exists in the white-noise they claim it does unless the plaintext is recovered.
Our government, nor any government, has ever been able to do the impractical, never mind the provably impossible.
The question is not whether we are restraining the government from knocking down some special doors. The question is more like whether we are preventing the government from using telepathy or defying gravity. No, nobody is preventing that except reality itself.
Our government has legally been allowed to knock down whichever door it has wanted to for centuries assuming it has received the proper warrants.
That's mostly true, but not completely. There are a number of doors that have always been barred:
- Self-incrimination
- Incrimination of a spouse
- Attorney-client relationship
- Minister/priest - parishioner relationship
- Doctor - patient relationship (?)
The doctor simply cannot force you to bear witness against yourself. Nor can they force your attorney to reveal what you said to him.
Some of these examples have a sort of exception, where a doctor or an attorney must give warning it they know that the subject person is going to commit murder, for example. But that's not the same as saying that the government can go back and look at past communications.
It used to be possible to destroy evidence: shred letters, burn receipts. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to do it. If the encryption is crippled, in the cloud based world the evidence of all your electronic communications will be indestructible, for the first time in history.
This breaks the HN guidelines badly, as have some other of your recent comments. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do that. Instead, post civil and substantive comments, and if you're not in a civil and substantive mood, please wait until you are.
"Let's have a dirty war on authoritarians" is the mirror image of Comey's threat that Congress will enact some horrible law if a terrorist uses encryption. A more palatable description of that threat would not be out of place in this debate.
Not true. You can jail the person for not revealing passwords if you have enough evidence and reasons to suspect the person is guilty and is hiding evidence behind encryption. This is not about being able to access something. This is about the ability to illegally search and seize all information at all times, often without any warrant at all. The government is worried not about not being able to search it, it's grasping for more totalitarian control of people's thoughts and behaviors. I guess because it's scared of what people are capable of.
One of the problems with outlawing encryption is that it takes nothing to prove the crime, and therefore it is impossible to prove one's innocence.
Would it be possible to outlaw the possession or transfer of data that appears random? Nearly all data is random data, and nearly all processes randomize data. All data could be "proven" to contain information under at least one encryption scheme. It is the ultimate guilty until proven innocent argument.
If your credit card were erased with a magnet, could you now be prosecuted for the possession of encrypted data, because it could be proven that using a certain one-time pad it could be transformed into something meaningful to humans?
It doesn't end there. All things could be interpreted as information. We would have to start explaining the arrangement of books on a shelf, of spices in a rack, colours of stitching in clothing. If encryption were illegal, we would all be guilty all the time.
Fine, some would argue that random data isn't proof of guilt. What about the means of encryption? Now all random data are one-time pad keys. Prepare to rot in jail.
Except, the law is about "reasonable doubt", and has been dealing with this kind of thing for hundreds of years. This isn't new magic.
By a similar argument, any phrase someone says to someone else might have been code for "kill that guy". Except usually it's not, and unless there is convincing evidence you did mean to kill that guy, you'll be set free.
Conversely, if you have previously agreed a code where "2+2=4" means "kill that guy", and then you say "2+2=4", you can't argue in court that "Oh, I was just saying a true statement of maths, how could that possibly be illegal?"
You're talking about reasonable doubt on an order to murder, I'm talking about reasonable doubt on the possession of encrypted data. Strongly encrypted data looks random and the only way to tell the difference is to have the decryption key. So is withholding the key sufficient for reasonable doubt? If it is, the law is useless; if it isn't, any random data is evidence of guilt.
Seems a little like saying, you burn some gas and your car goes, and if it goes 80mph, that's just physics. You can't make it illegal to obey the laws of physics?
Plants are just biology and burning things is just chemistry. You can't make it illegal for a plant to grow and for a human burn it and inhale it, can you?
Well...if you pass a law that pi=3 it doesn't change the nature of the universe, but it does regulate human transactions, and human behavior can be and sure is regulated using some strange laws.
> Seems a little like saying, you burn some gas and your car goes, and if it goes 80mph, that's just physics.
So, if you want to try to use this metaphor, the situation is actually a little bit different. Try this:
"Seat belts make it safe to go faster than 20 MPH, and tolerable to go faster than 80 MPH. Unfortunately, sometimes bank robbers use them while going faster than 80 MPH, so we have to ban seat belts entirely to prevent them from robbing banks."
Good one: brakes make it possible for bank robbers to travel faster than 80mph in a car, therefore the police must have a way to remotely disable brakes to catch escaping bank robbers. Oh you can trust the police the keep the brake-disabler safe from terrorists, don't worry.
From what I remember, the child pon drawing law was about people taking child pon photography, and running it through a Photoshop filter to make it look like a drawing. That way people were trying to get around the law. Also, it was trivial to return the 'drawing' back into a photo by reversing the filter.
All kinds of speech is regulated... talking about a murder is conspiracy, financial transactions are just bits moving around and they are highly regulated, talking about transactions incorrectly is fraud, yelling 'fire' in a crowded movie theater is a crime... as soon as there's a nexus between speech and action the speech is regulated.
Obviously there is much more to conspiracy than "talking about a murder," or Stephen King would be locked up in Supermax. It's as if Comey is asking for the right to review every murder mystery or horror novel before it hits the shelves. If he wants his job to be that easy, he should send his resume to North Korea.
The math-cannot-be-illegal argument gets more difficult when you consider that the digital representations of files are just really long numbers: Copyright infringement is making a copy of a (really secret) number. Possession of child pornography is the possession of a (really bad) number. etc.
I think the banning of encryption or forcing encryption products to have government backdoors would be horrifically bad policies, I don't think there is anything in our current legal framework that prevents it.
The difference is that math is an abstract concept with no physical manifestation. I can encrypt something in my head, but I can't make a physical bomb in my head.
Even when an encryption algorithm is implemented on a computer, it's still not a physical object, it's just a mathematical algorithm.
A computer simulation of explosive chemical reaction is not going to get you arrested, why should an encryption algorithm?
A computer simulation of a nuclear explosion could be considered illegal to possess under the "Born Secret" doctrine applied by the US government, depending on the circumstances.
Hum, no, math and chemistry are simply different on that.
Math can not harm anybody because math isn't real, it's speech (yes, maybe except for psychological harm). Chemistry is quite real.
Anyway, I don't see merit on the author's argument. It's true, but useless. The discussion is about protected speech and evidence gathering, nobody is claiming cryptography directly harms people.
Buried in the article below the clever though not original point that encryption is not math, is a much more important point:
This debate should really be about whether or not people have the right to have secrets.
If your answer is "no" then you ought to explain how you square that with the fact that many of our everyday activities can be considered criminal in some jurisdictions.
Is the position "people have the right to have secrets, but companies don't have the right to help them" coherent (not saying I endorse it)? We already accept that phone companies can (be forced to) allow wiretapping with a warrant. They aren't allowed to prevent the government from wiretapping. So why would a company be permitted to sell devices with encryption?
You also need to weaken "allowed to have secrets" to "allowed to have secrets in the presence of a warrant".
I'm starting with the unstated premise that we all have secrets in our heads.
Then as many have pointed out, that these devices are becoming extensions of our minds.
So I can see those companies thinking that they have a corporate responsibility to protect their users. Especially if not doing so puts their users in danger.
I don't assume that freedom loving countries like the US are the only countries where warrants are issued. Some warrants are issued in other countries, some of them with oppressive laws, and device makers need to think about users in those countries as well, not just about US users.
A somewhat scary discussion, but one that we might see sometime, would be is there some kind of metric we can apply to governments to see whether their judicial process is up to snuff in terms of protection of rights, where we then create systems that respect only those warrants from jurisdictions that meet a standard of rights protection. In other words build into whatever solution a recognition that not all warrants are created equal.
Not that this would surmount the security issues of having a backdoor that could be hacked. That's such a devastating flaw in the anti-Apple side that I'm not sure it can be overcome without the help of blinders.
I understand where the sentiment is coming from, but the point you are making here is incoherent. Your argument is literally this: people need encryption so that they can conceal evidence of crimes.
I think next time you pose this argument, you should remove the bit about how your actions might be illegal in some jurisdiction or other. It isn't doing the work for you that you think it is.
I perceived his point as more subtle than what you make it out to be.
The whole debate is about what's grey vs what's gray. I don't think there's a clear cut answer either way to the question "Is encryption an inviolable right?" The exercise here is to try and find a border between gray and grey, preferably avoiding any knee-jerk reaction such as backdooring every encryption scheme.
Note that I'm assuming such a border exists, which is, to be honest, not on such solid ground. It might very well be that this is an "all or nothing" deal, considering the nature of encryption...
Ugh, I have a bad typo in the first line, and unfortunately can no longer edit: "not math" should have been "just math."
But that doesn't seem to be what you're remarking on.
I'm not sure what you see as the problem with my argument. Some people, if private messages were read by people around them or by their local law enforcement, could be sentenced to death, in certain jurisdictions. For "crimes" like being Christian, Muslim, atheist, Gay, etc.
How is that a good thing?
How is it a bad thing that people want to protect themselves with encryption?
Or if you're saying you get the argument and I'm just doing a bad job of making it, yes, maybe so, but maybe it's a hard side of the argument to take. Any suggestions on how to put it better?
Or maybe you're saying it's entirely the wrong argument to make, tactically. I'm still not sure why. Having not heard a reason for not making this argument, I think it's good to make it because it seems to be discussed too little.
I don't speak for tptacek. But I think his point is that you're making the wrong argument. You're arguing that people should be able to conceal the evidence of crimes, because things that shouldn't be crimes are crimes in some jurisdictions. If you remove the last part (which tptacek said wasn't doing the work for you that you thought it was), then all you're left with is that people should be able to conceal the evidence of crimes. That's... not a convincing argument under current circumstances. Yes, there are people who are being prosecuted for things that, morally, shouldn't be crimes. But the current encryption battle is in the US, and most Americans perceive those "shouldn't be crimes" situations to be in other countries "way over there somewhere". They don't want murderers, rapists, and pedophiles in their neighborhood to get away with crimes due to encryption, and they're more worried about that then they are about homosexuals under ISIS. So it's a bad argument, politically, because it reduces political support for encryption rather than increases it.
Instead, you need to argue that completely innocent people need encryption, and you need to explain why they need it.
The word secrets wasn't intended to imply a criminal secret. But then the sentence after that (in my message) made it sound like that's exactly what a secret was. Yeah, I see the problem.
>Instead, you need to argue that completely innocent people need encryption, and you need to explain why they need it.
This makes sense, yes. The obvious answer being safety from bad guys who might gain illicit access to information that allows them to do harm.
Thanks to AnimalMuppet and thanks for confirming that this is what you meant.
I understand what you are saying, and it's a good point for the current case, for a discussion with the general (non-techie) public. I'll keep that in mind.
Quoting AnimalMuppet:
>If you remove the last part ... then all you're left with is that people should be able to conceal the evidence of crimes.
OK, that is precisely why I did NOT remove the last part, and it's precisely why the last part is important. The part about other jurisdictions having (sometimes) laws we might not all approve of.
So, what I think I'm getting from you (you two) is that most people will just snip that last part off in their minds, and they'll be left with something they would never agree with. OK, fair enough, and thanks for pointing it out.
Sometimes I think the general public wonders what the hell Apple's problem is, and why would they place SUCH a high value on (what is perceived as simply) privacy.
My point about other jurisdictions is also just my own speculation on what kind of issues Apple is thinking about, in addition to the fundamental insecurity of effectively having a back door. It may not be a large part of their thinking, or maybe it is, I can see it both ways... On the one hand Tim is a corporate man, and on the other hand he's also running a company that goes out on limbs for corporate [edit: and social] responsibility.
Encryption is part of reality, like gravity. We can say "government agents have been able to vault fences for hundreds of years." So fences should only be four feet high, so they can't conceal crimes or prevent entry?
Government is limited by reality, math, physics, the height of walls, the fact that telepathy isn't a thing, etc. Encryption is just one more limitation.
I enjoyed the article's major theme of encryption as math - but the dedication of the second & third paragraphs to disparaging analogies was distracting.
Educating HN and SV on this topic is throwing so many logs on the fire - I literally haven't met anybody in tech that doesn't strongly support Apple / encryption.
On the other hand analogies - like "locks, doors, and burritos" - are the only chance we have to sway the POPULAR opinion in this country which currently sits 52% in favor of handing the govt the keys. (2)
And Donald Trump has recently shown with great effect what speaking like / explaining thing simply (at a 3rd grade level in fact) can do to reach Americans. (3)
And, as for "Illegal Math" in general, unfortunately there's prior art in this department as well ;-) (4) (5)
Poul-Henning Kamp (bsdphk) known from FreeBSD and Varnish, have speculated that the future will bring certification for using cryptography, where decryption keys will need be placed on government servers.
He says that to avoid this to happen the citizens need to demand access to strong cryptography.
"No law of Congress can place in the hands of officials connected with the Postal Service any authority to invade the secrecy of letters and such sealed packages in the mail; and all regulations adopted as to mail matter of this kind must be in subordination to the great principle embodied in the fourth amendment of the Constitution."
(Ex parte Jackson, 96 U.S. 727, 733 (1877))
Why does this not also apply to newly invented forms of communication
> Any image file or an executable program can be regarded as simply a very large binary number. In certain jurisdictions, there are images that are illegal to possess, due to obscenity or secrecy/classified status, so the corresponding numbers could be illegal.
Various government agencies are crooning that they should be able to knock down whichever doors they please because they're the government. Not really a sound argument but… they're the government after all.
Various government agencies are crooning that they should be able to knock down whichever doors they please because the interests of being able to have somebody find out what people are doing under certain scenarios is preferable to never being able to do it.
The fact you misrepresent the argument as simply "because they're the government" means you either don't understand the opposing side or you're willfully misrepresenting them. In either case, why would anyone who doesn't already agree with you take what you said seriously?
i have never seen this article, thanks for reposting it. This articulated a bunch of things I have a very difficult time explaining to other non cs people. very well put.
Mostly the maths just enables easy key distribution and makes encryption viable for commerce and privacy. I don't see the public benefit in restricting this. It seems more targeted at ordinary citizens than criminals or foreign powers.
If all you want to do is bring down the government then you can distribute one time pads on microsd cards and there is not much legislation can do to stop that. Any governments planning to ban xor?
Serious question: Even if a government makes encryption illegal, if I have the source code to gpg then I can still encrypt anything I want right? In other words, even if we lose secure access via SSL because of a master cipher, nobody can make the gpg source code, for example, disappear entirely.
The government also can't stop you from robbing your neighbor, but that's not how laws work. Laws are about punishing you after the fact. If they catch you, of course.
Well, encryption is already effectively illegal in the UK. Using unauthorized VPNs is illegal in Saudi Arabia. And Iran, I believe. Tor and VPNs are effectively illegal in China, although mostly they just block access.
So it will be interesting to see where the US goes on this. The lines are being drawn.
This is a similar debate we had 20 years ago, when people were fighting against the government who wanted to limit encryption to 56-bit DES. Stronger algorithms were not allowed (and then they acquiesced and allowed stronger keys to be used within the US only, unless you applied for special licenses). But you could print out the same encryption algorithms as a book or even a t-shirt and it would be totally legal and exportable. The government was saying that they were protecting us, but really it did nothing.
It was ridiculous and we had a few years of relative peace on the encryption front until this whole faux-terrorist debacle.
Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman did not invent public-private-key-encryption. It was invented in secret by mathematicians working at GCHQ before Diffie and Hellman but not publicly acknowledged until 1997 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_H._Ellis
Well, technically yes. But a) the invention of asymmetric encryption at GHCQ was kept secret, so Diffie and Hellman did not know about it; they invented it independently, it happens from time to time. And b) AFAIK, GHCQ did not develop asymmetric encryption into anything practically usable, they did come up with the basic concept, but stopped there (again: AFAIK - I am happy to be corrected if I have been misinformed there).
I wouldn't go so far as to say that the author made no interest points, but statements like this are a perfect example of that STEM worker arrogance stemming from the logical fallacy that just because you control systems which masses of people don't understand but rely on heavily (and make good money doing it in a secure comfortable job), that you have adequate knowledge to make sweeping statements in other areas outside of engineering knowledge.
It isn't the math, but the activity of _applying_ that math in actual communications which is subject to legal statutes and regulation, which I don't pretend to be an expert on, but know enough of my own ignorance about the theory and practice of the law (and having a number of attorneys in the family to check my own tendency toward that aforementioned arrogance) to understand that it isn't a simple freedom of expression or open knowledge issue.
Specific example: chemistry is physics & physics is math. Should all chemical processes be protected on these grounds?
I agree with your conclusion that we should let people secure their own information, but not because the process of securing information is an algorithm derived from math research.
Analogies are stupid. It's perfectly constitutional for a law to be passed to ban encryption. It'd be a stupid, terrible law with horrific consequences. But there's nothing unconstitutional about bad laws. We have more than a few as is.
Even though the contents of iPhone is encrypted, the government agencies have been able to get that out of iCloud with the help of Apple in the past. So it is not entirely true that the whole encrypted content is off limits in all cases. May be that is all that is needed. And may be we shouldn't need to do anything more which I think is a valid argument. However, lets also not paint the ones who request such a feature as "morons"
What happens if the government succeeds? When manufacturers and software shops are required to leave keys for the FBI, NSA, etc for all encrypted storage and communication, what will happen to our technological world?
Has anyone written about the probable unintended consequences? I think it could happen and I am concerned.
This is sort of how I have always felt about the idea of "legal or exportable levels of encryption." It seems a very strange thing. However, even though we may be right that it lacks sense, I don't think the government is moved by such an argument.
Clearly the writer is not a mathematician. It is easy to see that math can be illegal. It is enough to consider the obvious example of encryption in violation of various export laws and we are done.
I think this analogy is apt but it actually works against the author's point. Our government has legally been allowed to knock down whichever door it has wanted to for centuries assuming it has received the proper warrants. An encryption door cannot be knocked down. That is a very scary problem for the government and law enforcement. Things like personal notes, journals, communications all used to be accessible to the government through warrants. Now that information is all locked away behind encryption. This is a huge shift in the way governments fight crime. We need to recognize that fact in order to have any productive debate with anti-encryption folks and we can't just pretend the government is evil because they wanted to keep the status quo of the physical world alive into the digital era.