Comment by studentrob | Hacker News Reader

Comment by studentrob | Hacker News Reader

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Tim Cook isn't the only one who should be standing up here.

We all, as technologists, need to do our part in educating the public. This debate will not be finished even if the court case is won by Apple.

The next time terrorists use encryption to hide their communications, who do you think the DOJ will seek to blame? They will blame technologists for blocking anti-encryption bills, and then the public will take an alarmist stance and agree to whatever the DOJ asks.

There is still currently 42% of the population who believes the government should be able to compel Apple to write software, which they do not want to write, that aids the FBI [1].

That's 42% of the population who will attack the IT industry with everything they can muster.

Think of all the Trump supporters. Then imagine that as an attack on encryption. We need to get ahead of this and educate the public and our representatives.

[1] http://www.politico.com/tipsheets/morning-cybersecurity/2016...

>The next time terrorists use encryption to hide their communications,

Has there been a first time? From my understanding to date there has not been any proven evidence that has been "hidden" away by encryption by terrorists.

In this case they have most of the info, obtained from apple under court order via the iCloud storage which Apple has full access to and can provide to Law Enforcement

In Paris the Terrorists used normal non-encrypted SMS

This entire FUD about "going dark" seems to be completely in the minds of the FBI and Prosecutors likely brought about by watching too many Bad Movies and TV Shows

>From my understanding to date there has not been any proven evidence that has been "hidden" away by encryption by terrorists.

To be fair it's hard to know if there has been since we can't take a peek into the encryption

True, but until such time they have proven it is an issue and that there are not other investigative avenues to be used to capture and prosecute terrorists then they should keep their hands off my encryption

That is how free societies work, we do not give up freedom simply because there might at some point in the future be a problem...

I'm not suggesting that they should break encryption, but I'd like to point out again that it's pretty hard to prove that breaking encryption is necessary in "the fight against terrorism" until they can break the encryption and show us the content.

If they get to the content in other ways we are just going to say: "aha, see you don't need to break encryption after all"

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