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treerock

> Changes in laws cannot provide access to data that was never gathered and stored in the first place.

Laws can and have been written that require companies to gather data.

> Similarly, laws cannot force a company to divulge encrypted data if the company does not hold the encryption keys.

Laws can and have been written that require companies to use weaker or broken encryption.

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> Laws can and have been written that require companies to gather data.

Not just that. Laws can (and probably have been) written that require companies to gather data and to explicitly lie about it.

> to explicitly lie about it.

Maybe I'm dense or naive, but I don't think there's any precedent for that. A gag order is one thing (and there are certainly places for it), but forcing someone to lie would hopefully violate the First Amendment.

> Maybe I'm dense or naive, but I don't think there's any precedent for that.

It's well know about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/warrant-canary-faq

It's strange that chainsaw10 is being downvoted for their comment. From the second link above, "Have courts upheld compelled false speech? No, and the cases on compelled speech have tended to rely on truth as a minimum requirement." That sounds more like there is not precedent to force people to tell explicit lies.

True, of course. But we would presumably know about these laws, in advance, and we would have the ability to make choices based on this knowledge.

Apple has thus far been steadfast in resisting this sort of activity and in advocating against any such laws.

So for me at least, this is behavior that is worthy of trust.

> But we would presumably know about these laws, in advance

Court rulings and legal authorisations to conduct surveilance can and have ... you guessed it ... been kept secret

Also true. But we know from the Snowden revelations and other sources that Apple has been backing up its promises. So we have at least some level of assurance that Apple is a good actor.

>Laws can and have been written that require companies to use weaker or broken encryption.

Source? Example? I don't know an example of this. (At least in the US)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40-bit_encryption was the most secure thing it was legal to export. The Netscape browser, in particular, had a lot of hoops you had to go through in order to get the 56 bit version meant for US audiences. Therefore, even most Americans with internet access at the time had the crippled international version.

I would also consider the NSA meddling with Bitlocker and RSA behind the curtain to be conceptually equivalent.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/03/can_the_nsa_b...

http://gizmodo.com/nsa-paid-security-firm-10-million-bribe-t...

That's saying that agencies can break TPM chips and get Bitlocker keys. Which is obviously true, as even a private individual has done so to a TPM.

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