Well, you're going pretty far afield there. Devices implanted in our heads to read our thoughts? George Orwell would be shocked.
I made this point on purpose. Our government is constantly asking for more power "because terrorism" and a lot of people eat it up. "Sure, we need to give you a little extra capability so you can stop these bad terrorists!" And then when another terrorist attack happens (because perfect security is impossible), the cycle repeats.
We don't go from honky dory happy democratic freedom land to dystopian police state in one fell swoop. It happens in baby steps.
So sure, the leap to the current level of government surveillance to mind reading is a huge one today. It seems looney to even suggest it, I'll admit. But would it really seem that huge a leap after 100 or 1000 of those baby steps have happened and the technology is available and the government is asking for it "because terrorism"?
The point is that granting the government more and more ability to surveil us (or letting them try to do it on their own illegally) is a very slippery slope. If we don't start accepting that we'll never be perfectly safe and tolerate some criminals getting away with their crime, everyone is going to wake up one day and finally see situation they've put themselves in only it will be too late to really do anything about it. It's pretty tough to revolt against a government that is tapped into all communications.
I'm not suggesting that a revolt should happen or anything like that, just saying that I think we are absolutely headed towards a dystopian police state sort of future with the way things have been going in the last 20 years. We aren't powerless to stop it today, but we most certainly could be in the future. The founding fathers would be ashamed about what the government has done to limit and intrude upon civil liberties already. Then again, they didn't allow women to vote and considered black people to be fractions of a person.
Even with thousands of phones, if there's an individual warrant on each one, I don't have a problem with it. (Not that I think it's fair to Apple or any private entity to be conscripted into government service. That's another issue.) I would be opposed to a blanket permission to break into them without any due process. Police already break down all the doors they're authorized to break down on raids and manhunts. Those require individual warrants--else they're illegal, and honest courts won't allow anything gathered during them to stick. This is just the same principle applied to a new age. Or it should be. As I've said repeatedly, if it goes beyond that, it can't be allowed to stand. I'm completely with you on that score.
This question of encryption is a very thorny one. There is no analogue to encryption in the physical world, no box that is truly impregnable that something can be hidden in. That would suggest that there should be some sort of way for law enforcement to break encryption given probable cause and a warrant. So the question becomes what to do about it.
There are some options available today:
- Mandate some sort of encryption back door.
- Mandate only very weak encryption.
- Ban encryption outright.
- Accept that unbreakable encryption exists and do nothing.
There are many, significant problems with the first three. First of all, anything the U.S. mandates only applies to the U.S. "Oh, so products in the U.S. have no/broken/weak encryption? I'll just acquire a German or Swiss product that doesn't have these constraints." In both cases, not only has the government not really solved the problem (getting access to encryption), but they have just caused huge damage to the U.S. technology sector and U.S. economy in terms of global business.
Secondly, strong, basically unbreakable encryption is already available and in most cases it is open source. Encryption is just math. There is no way to put that cat in the bag. Even if strong encryption is illegal in the U.S., is that really going to stop criminals from using it? Heroin is illegal. It's illegal to own a gun with out a permit. It's illegal to drive without a valid license. But criminals do this stuff all the time. The sheer fact that something is illegal does not mean it is not available and that criminals will not use it or do it.
Just like there is no analogue of encryption in the physical world, there's not really a good analogue of a warrant to search a physical place or object in the digital world. This is because everything is globally connected. Items in the physical world require physical proximity to search. You can't be a world away and access a house, for instance. In the digital world, virtually everything is connected to the Internet in some way and, as such, is mere milliseconds away from anyone.
That's exactly why strong encryption is so important. Though criminals seem to have the upper hand today due to all the security vulnerabilities in systems, we really want strong encryption to protect our personal information so that criminals can't use it for their own gain and to our detriment. If we put backdoors in encryption, whether that be a master dual signing key that is stored in some system controlled by the government or just a general hardcoded backdoor, those things will stay secret for only a limited amount of time and once the criminals get their hands on them it is game over. It'd be like having no encryption at all.
If we take steps to weaken or break encryption so that law enforcement can get in with a valid warrant, what do we accomplish in the long run? Sure, law enforcement will be able to get into the encryption used by idiot criminals and people that do something illegal spontaneously. But the truly scary criminals? Crime syndicates, nation states, organized terrorist groups, and extreme deviants will just continue using strong encryption while the average people are the ones left using the broken encryption.
So if the government's goal is truly stopping terrorism or pedophiles, weakening encryption probably isn't the way to go about about it. The only things they'll accomplish is making average people more vulnerable to criminals and damaging our economy. I have to be frank here. I think there are plenty of smart people in government that know that already. I think that their goal isn't stopping terrorists and pedophiles at all. I think the goal is to enable pervasive surveillance of the American populace. I truly do.
I think the last option, just accepting that strong encryption is a thing that is here to stay, is the best choice out of a list of bad choices. Sure, there will be times law enforcement won't be able to collect the evidence they need to put away some criminals. There will be times when intelligence about a network of terrorist cells isn't collected. But, like late Justice Scalia said, "the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all".
Getting back to the current case about the iPhone, it isn't really an instance of the government weakening encryption, so my wall of text above doesn't really apply in that specific case. But it is another example of the government extending its power. It's trying to conscript Apple into its service. We need to start saying more than, "No thanks". We need to start saying "Hell no! Don't tread on me, motherfuckers!"
