but there is no "balance" when somethig is binary. You either have encryption or you don't.
Higher priority freedoms:
1. Freedom of religious choice and freedom from religious persecution. Freedom of religious assembly.
2. Freedom to immigrate to the US.
Lower Priority Freedoms:
1. Freedom to purchase guns and ammunition
2. Freedom to use encryption to keep personal communication private
The government isn't saying that no one should be able to encrypt data. They just thing that, in some cases, it should be done in such a way that certain data can be read by use of a centralized master key.
This, of course, presents certain problems. What if that master key leaks?
But it's not binary. Data secured this way is absolutely safer than not encrypting something at all. "Is it safe enough?" is certainly a question that people can disagree on.
It's not binary.
I lied, there is an award for effort. Wherever you have an "reasonable expectation of privacy", the government must get a warrant or your permission to exercise its search and seizure authority. That's the protection that you're entitled to by our laws.
Even the EFF is acknowledging the weakness of your argument when they try to frame it as an issue about Apple's free speech instead.
* Minors cannot buy guns.
* Convicted felons cannot buy guns in most circumstances.
* There are numerous locations in which it is illegal to bring a gun.
* There are numerous types of guns that you are not allowed to own.
It's still not broken in any technical sense, but if I don't want a third party to read my data and they are still able to do so, it's a stretch to call it encryption.
But Google itself can access and read your email. It does so in an automated fashion to target ads at you.
So is your gmail encrypted? Well...kind of.
It's not binary.
With a government-held master key, there is no such contract.
And besides, the existence of a contract or not isn't really my point. My point was that encryption isn't an all or nothing situation. You don't either have completely ironclad security where you and only you can access your data or nothing at all.
There are degrees of technical protection. That was my point. The black and white thinking about this issue is wrong.
Isn't the point of discussing this that you actually don't have anything that defines that contract? In terms of the fourth amendment, it seems like there is quite the opposite contract in place already. Also, as an Apple product user outside the U.S., this supposed contract is not something that I ever agreed to.
> And besides, the existence of a contract or not isn't really my point. My point was that encryption isn't an all or nothing situation. You don't either have completely ironclad security where you and only you can access your data or nothing at all.
It is an all or nothing situation. That there is only one unauthorized party able to intercept my data using a back door doesn't change the fact that there is an unauthorized party able to intercept my data using a back door. Whether that is practical for you or not, again, depends on whether you consider the third back-dooring third party authorized.
> There are degrees of technical protection.
I think that maybe the discussion here comes from the fact that you are indeed talking about "technical protection" in general and not encryption specifically. The point of encryption is that only eligible parties can decode the data. If others can decode the data it's not really encrypted, as a matter of definition.
For example, using Google as a mail provider may prove to be poor "technical protection", but the data is encrypted and the authorized parties are part of the terms of service. That the U.S. government can decode my encrypted data without permission may prove to be practical "technical protection", but in terms of encryption it really is a boolean situation.
So if you're doing US national security, you cannot accept the Obama position; any technology to which our "good guy" law enforcement could get access is guaranteed to also be a technology to which a "bad guy" foreign enemy combatant could similarly gain access.
If you're a major US corporation, you cannot accept the Obama position; any technology to which our "good guy" law enforcement could get access is guaranteed to also be a technology to which a "bad guy" foreign intelligence/espionage agent could similarly gain access.
So as far as that is concerned, it is binary. You can either be secure against foreign threats, in which case you are also as a side effect impenetrable to the local "good guys". Or you can be penetrable by the local "good guys" and also as a side effect penetrable by the foreign "bad guys".
The argument advanced against Obama's position is that A) it fundamentally fails to acknowledge this reality, and B) seems to argue for deliberately compromising national security in order to... preserve national security? In other words, it is not only unrealistic, it is in fact nonsensical and self-contradictory.
Again, security & encryption aren't binary. It isn't on or off. Different levels of protection are appropriate for different levels of threats. The lock on my mom's suburban house is a lot weaker than the lock on the vault holding the gold at Fort Knox.
Similarly the kind of security appropriate for consumer grade cell phones might be different than the kind appropriate for guarding US national security secrets.
Comments like this are exactly why he used it.
And quite frankly, yes, I do hold the security and privacy of data as more important than the terrorism song and dance the government is playing. And I do hold that view absolutely.
You have a very narrow view of what information is sensitive. Do you know how many Americans work either directly in, or in industries associated with, defense? How many of them use Apple products as part of their work?
Or let's take a more down-to-earth example: I work for a company in the health-care space. We have health records on thousands of people, and as we expand we'll have more health records on more people. With your approach, where should we draw the line? Would it be OK to use security bad enough that, say, an Eastern European organized-crime ring could break in? Or do we need to defend against them and not against the KGB? How do we figure out what level of tools to use to do that? How do we figure out whether what we have now will still be mafia-proof in five years?
Oh, and keep in mind that legally we have to protect that data, and improper access to it can not just shut down the company but send me and my co-workers to jail. How much would you be willing to compromise with that on the line? If the potential consequences to you were jail time, how much on the side of Obama and the FBI would you be? How much risk of that would you take on in order to make law enforcement's life a little bit easier?
And in case you think this is a red herring, remember the San Bernardino shooter... worked for a public-health department.
You should fix that.
The fact that it's an iPhone in the San Bernardino case is kind of a red herring; the precedent it would set is not "iPhones and only iPhones and not any other type of computing device are subject to law enforcement unlocking". The precedent it would set is that any encrypted system must be built to be decrypted on demand by law enforcement.
And that gets back to my original comment: a system the "good guys" can decrypt is one the "bad guys" will be able to decrypt too.
Like, I get you. By allowing X which might actually be OK, we might allow X+1 to happen and that wouldn't be OK. So we must oppose X as a practical matter.
I get the practicality of that.
But when you start opposing X as a matter of principle rather than simply as a matter of practicality that's when you've gone off the rails.
The government always leaks keys. Sometimes literally.
http://www.wired.com/2015/09/lockpickers-3-d-print-tsa-lugga...
http://nypost.com/2015/09/20/the-8-key-that-can-open-new-yor...
Plus, any key that the government can use without your permission, they can illegally abuse. And if there's one thing we've seen proven recently, it's that such abuse will occur.
That's still pretty safe.