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Comment by S4M | Hacker News Reader

Thank you Jacques for writing how something that would be completely unacceptable in the physical world is deemed perfectly fine online. It has always bothered me.

Take for example how the FBI wants to have automatic access to the data in all iphones through a backdoor. Would that be considered OK if they asked lockers makers to make their locks accept a master key so they would be able to enter in anybody's house, so they could monitor further people they suspect to be terrorist?

Of course that would cause an uproar, but the general public being so uneducated with technology, I guess they don't see how the two are related.

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> Would that be considered OK if they asked lockers makers to make their locks accept a master key

Didn't TSA do exactly this, only to have CAD designs of the master keys reverse-engineered from a photo and posted in GitHub? https://github.com/Xyl2k/TSA-Travel-Sentry-master-keys

"Would that be considered OK if they asked lockers makers to make their locks accept a master key so they would be able to enter in anybody's house, so they could monitor further people they suspect to be terrorist?"

I don't know. But I know that it would be absolutely normal to pick your lock and/or knock down your door if they had a warrant. It would even be OK for them to ask the lock company, door company, and landlord to help them do that. For that matter, the landlord could even be compelled to surrender his master key for the entire apartment complex.

All of those things could happen out here in the big blue room, and nobody would blink an eye. Funny how these metaphors to the physical world clear things up, isn't it?

But when the FBI gets the key or picks the lock it does not make any other door more insecure, or enables other parties to get into other doors.

What if the FBI would ask all landlords to install a special door to every apartment, but only the FBI has the key to this special door? What if someone successfully copies that key? Now they have access to all apartments.

First off, this already happens: every major corporation uses multi-party disk encryption, usually branded as "recovery options" or some such. They keep their private keys secure.

Second off, the FBI is not asking for a special door to every apartment. They are asking a lock manufacturer to create a key and use it to unlock a single lock that is brought to them, after the lock manufacturer explicitly designed their locks to make the creation of such a key possible, so that this legal case would exist.

There is an interesting debate to be had here, but this rhetoric using overly simplified analogies is not it.

Obviously, "making all locks insecure" is a different situation than bypassing a single door. Which is why we don't do the former, but (currently) do the latter, judiciously.

But hey: what if the lock company makes a standard lock, with a plain ol', low-security, five-pin key, and attaches it to a bomb that destroys the apartment when it's picked incorrectly? Does the lock company now get to beg off when the police come looking for help opening a single door?

"Oh, we'd love to help you, officer, but you see...if we help you open this particular lock, then all criminals will know that you can disable the bomb, and that would make all of our locks less secure!"

This makes no sense whatsoever.

Yes, I think they do.

It's already possible, any physical lock or home or safe can be opened with a warrant. The fact that we're almost at a point where we can hide something from the government (even with a warrant) is groundbreaking.

It's perfectly fine that the FBI or the police can open a physical lock with a warrant. The warrant is supposed to be delivered by someone representing the Justice department, which is (theoretically) independent from the police. What would be unacceptable is that they could just bypass that authority and enter to anybody's home on a whim.

Which is what they are trying to achieve when they asked Apple to put a backdoor in their Iphones.

"The warrant is supposed to be delivered by someone representing the Justice department, which is (theoretically) independent from the police."

I hate to break it to you, but the FBI is part of the Department of Justice. I think you mean that a warrant needs to be issued by the judiciary, which (as far as I know) is a truism. Courts issue warrants, there is a warrant in the Apple case, and it in no way involves a "backdoor" being placed in all Apple phones.

You really might want to look up some of the facts about this case. It's not nearly as general as you think it is.

Warrants are really only a defence against mass, dragnet style surveillance since with enough will, anybody can become subject of a warrant if those who are investigating them have enough will to get one.

and all communications being recorded is like having every phone line tapped by default. And USPS / Royal Mail opening everyone's mail.

It's not "perfectly fine online". In fact, much of it is already illegal in most civilized countries, and has been long before internet was a big thing.

However, any attempt to execute and finetune legislation and regulation to explicitly include the online is generally either ridiculed (example: the EU "cookie law", which is actually a "don't track without explicit permission" law) or portrayed as anti-American protectionism on forums like HN.

I agree that there is plenty of whining by American companies about EU privacy protection laws, but the cookie law was still worthy of ridicule, even for an European like me who quite appreciates the Data Protection Directive. The intention was good, but the implementation was flawed, and predictably so.

Yes, indeed it was. They focused on the technical implementation rather than the activity.

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