The threat to the government grows bigger by the minute.
No surprise from the keepers of the Beltway establishment, the
Washington Post, on the fact that new Apple and Android phones will have encryption so solid, the companies themselves won't be able to crack them for government agencies.
What has the law enforcement community up in arms is the prospect of losing access to the data on these smartphones in cases where they have a valid, court-approved search warrant.
No, that's not the problem. The problem is that they want Apple and Google to do the dirty work for them, and do it in secret. Can the FBI search your house in secret? Nope, they need to serve you with a warrant. Why should the phone be any different?
If they have a valid court order, let them deliver it to the person they are targeting. If that person doesn't comply with the court order, he or she can then be dealt with according to long-established law. None of this "trust us, we won't abuse our secret powers issued by secret courts" bullshit. If it can be abused, it will. And it has. Repeatedly.
See more, below the fold.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said this could imperil investigations in kidnapping and other cases; FBI Director James B. Comey said he could not understand why the tech companies would “market something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law.”
The tech companies have marketed something that expressly protects them from malicious hackers ... which also sometimes happen to be government agents.
This is not about mass surveillance.
Why would anyone think that? Oh, because it has been. It's also about gross government abuses, which don't have to be "mass" in scale to matter.
Law enforcement authorities are not asking for the ability to surveil everyone’s smartphone, only those relatively few cases where there is a court-approved search warrant.
So serve that warrant to the phone's order. Simple! It just can't be done with secrecy so tight, that the tech companies aren't even allowed to announce they were compelled to turn information over.
This seems reasonable and not excessively intrusive.
The market disagrees, and Apple and Google have responded. If the government is hobbled by new market-induced encryption, they have only themselves to blame.
Funny thing is, if the phone of one of their reporters was secretly breached based on a secret court order, they'd be (justifiably) outraged. It's not always "bad guys" targeted by asshole government agencies. Sometimes, it's just people who make the people in power uncomfortable.
However, with all their wizardry, perhaps Apple and Google could invent a kind of secure golden key they would retain and use only when a court has approved a search warrant.
Already had that. It didn't work. And in an era of secret courts, can never work. Not to mention if a key exists, it will be cracked by someone. Or leaked to the bad guys.
Ultimately, Congress could act and force the issue,
I'd like to see them try. Seriously, go for it. Aside from mandating the biggest invasion of privacy in the history of the nation (because it will be abused, that much is obvious), it would be the death knell of American technology companies. It's a global economy, and no one, inside and
especially out, wants the American (or local) government to have magical keys—golden or silver or platinum—to the contents of their phones.