[ethbro]

Substituting a straw man doesn't undercut parent's point.

Right to true encryption is tantamount to right to perfect privacy, including privacy for committing crimes. This has been the current situation if true crypto was properly used for a while but we seem to be moving into a world beyond that - where such crypto is available to anyone who purchases a mobile phone and configures a few options.

I believe (and I would assume you do to) that widespread encryption is the preferable choice over key escrow, but let's not pretend that ready accessible consumer hard encryption doesn't fundamentally alter the balance between government and its citizens (including in some morally questionable ways).

[fweespee_ch]

> I believe (and I would assume you do to) that widespread encryption is the preferable choice over key escrow, but let's not pretend that ready accessible consumer hard encryption doesn't fundamentally alter the balance between government and its citizens (including in some morally questionable ways).

It has existed for centuries. Ease of access isn't some magical balance of power altering problem.

People can break encryption through various attacks [Keyloggers, observing people entering their keycodes, etc]. The government should have to go that route too, just like they do to break into literally everything else. They hire a professional.

Encryption isn't some magical shield and is breakable without attacking it directly.

http://www.wired.com/2012/11/ff-the-manuscript/

> For more than 260 years, the contents of that page—and the details of this ritual—remained a secret. They were hidden in a coded manuscript, one of thousands produced by secret societies in the 18th and 19th centuries. At the peak of their power, these clandestine organizations, most notably the Freemasons, had hundreds of thousands of adherents, from colonial New York to imperial St. Petersburg. Dismissed today as fodder for conspiracy theorists and History Channel specials, they once served an important purpose: Their lodges were safe houses where freethinkers could explore everything from the laws of physics to the rights of man to the nature of God, all hidden from the oppressive, authoritarian eyes of church and state. But largely because they were so secretive, little is known about most of these organizations. Membership in all but the biggest died out over a century ago, and many of their encrypted texts have remained uncracked, dismissed by historians as impenetrable novelties.

[ethbro]

> Ease of access isn't some magical balance of power altering problem. [...] People can break encryption through various attacks [Keyloggers, observing people entering their keycodes, etc].

This is where we disagree. What you've enumerated are attacks of convenience against a cryptographic implementation, not cryptography itself. And this is exactly what ease of access dramatically shifts.

The real twist isn't that Apple is suddenly providing quality encryption. We've had unbreakable encryption since the first one-time pad. IMHO, the FBI et al. didn't care because a statistically relevant number of people didn't use it. The twist is that Apple suddenly packaged that up into a consumer device with a quality implementation and all the hard details handled. And the FBI et al. do care because a very statistically relevant number of people use iPhones.

So yes, ease of access is a balance altering change. Because really, I don't think the government cares if hard encryption exists: it cares if lots of people use it.

[fweespee_ch]

> What you've enumerated are attacks of convenience against a cryptographic implementation

That is how you break into vaults, fyi.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw_4HQMS-pk

[ethbro]

The difference is that it's impossible to make a perfectly secure vault (correct me if I'm wrong). But... physics.

You can encrypt something that will need hypothetical quantum computers / processing until the heat death of the universe to decrypt without the key.

[fweespee_ch]

You can make a vault that destroys the contents and is perfectly secure except for the implementation. That is basically the iPhone "problem" the FBI are complaining about.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/8017041/MI6-Q...

> When forty spectators assembled for an outdoor trial, they reported that the safe seemed to be “on the point of explosion” and the gas issuing out of holes in the bottom of the safe meant it was “lifted some inches off the ground” forcing observes to retire to a “place of safety behind the building.”

Nothing really prevents you from having a safe that after N failed attempts from destroying the contents with explosives.

[ethbro]

> Nothing really prevents you from having a safe that after N failed attempts from destroying the contents with explosives.

I would hope that a number of laws prohibit my carrying on my person a small safe filled with explosives and a known-effective trigger. Hypothetically, we could create such a safe.

Practically, however, we could not create one that would be as easily and broadly used as an iPhone. Therefore, the nature of the social question presented by a perfectly secure (for all intents and purposes, or at least a future iteration that is) mass market device is fairly novel.