The issue with the Snowden revelations and similiar programs is that there is no warrant or court process.
They can gain physical access to the phone, just like they can gain physical access to a safe; they can also compel the production of physical keys or security tokens, if any. They can't compel you to provide information from your mind, such as the passphrase to a phone.
Being compelled to produce any information from your mind to incriminate yourself is not acceptable.
In the USA because of the Fifth Amendment which protects individuals from being forced to incriminate themselves. [1]
Other (civilised) countries have similar laws.
Which makes something like the UK law which forces an individual to reveal their private key, at conflict.
Specifically about my own country, The Netherlands recently adopted a revision of the computer criminality law (it being v3 of it). It is called the 'hack back law' because one major part of it is it allows the police to hack suspects. That's not all it is about though. Of note, the part scrapped was the one about a suspect being forced to hand over their private key.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Amendment_to_the_United_...
In the UK, they can [1]
[1] https://falkvinge.net/2012/07/12/in-the-uk-you-will-go-to-ja...
If you can be forced to divulge something that you know in order to convict yourself, where exactly do you draw the line? Yes, revealing a password that you know isn't exactly forced confession, but there are a lot of stops along that path that are short of being forced to confess and yet probably prejudicial against yourself. So what is the right being defended and are the current boundaries appropriate?
Revealing a password reveals that you knew the password. It's admitting to having access to the device.
There is also the obvious problem when you don't know the password. It's manifestly unreasonable to punish someone for not doing something they can't actually do.
But if not knowing is unconditionally a valid excuse then this is all a just hair splitting exercise to determine how defendants will phrase the refusal. And if it's only conditionally a valid excuse then you're back to forcing someone to testify as to why they don't know the password (e.g. admitting "that's not my phone").
IMO, that's clearly a 1st amendment violation.
There is no requirement that they be able to access the content (building the safe is not illegal), but there is a procedure that lets them try under appropriate conditions. What the parent posters have been talking about is a permission structure like that where law enforcement can try their best. Doesn't force anyone to write software in a particular way.
> On a case-by-case basis, with proper court process, requiring an individual to provide a passcode or thumbprint to unlock a device could assist law enforcement in obtaining critical evidence without undermining the security or privacy of the broader population.
I can write a piece of messaging software which writes one of the following two in a log, without exception: (1) hash of /dev/urandom (2) message history with passphrase encryption
If the government comes to me and asks for my passphrase and I say "I don't have one", how can they prove that I have a passphrase and am in contempt of any lawful order? The only actual way to enforce this is to make it illegal to write software which does (1).
My point is: the reason the quoted parts in the top-level post are ugly is because search warrants should already be sufficient, unless you want to crack down on the ability of citizens to do the above.
If not decrypting what looks like random bytes (because that's what good encryption looks like) becomes punishable in a country, it's no longer safe to visit that country with any digital data carriers.
> why not your phone as well
They can do whatever they want to my phone with a warrant. What they can't do is force me against my will to testify as to the contents of the phone. Be very careful not to conflate those two activities.
For Americans, yes, or rather that the NSA meddles with internal US affairs at all. For the rest of the world, the issue is of privacy, economic espionage, and having no way to vote in the US to get rid of this practice. Apart from Merkel. She only cared her personal phone was tapped. Which is exactly what I expect the NSA to do: target specific high priority targets. Including heads of nation states.
But, economic espionage and mass surveillance? No.
Can they compel you to tell them how to decode your diary, or force you to produce a decoded copy of your diary?
The police can seize my puzzles, but they can't compell me to tell them the solution, even if they can't solve it themselves.
It does miss the effects (potentially incriminating content being decrypted), and maybe it's a bit too silly.