Leave whatever jurisdiction was attempting to force me to build something unethical, and after being safely out of that jurisdiction, disclose absolutely everything I can about the attempted coercion.
This is one of many excellent arguments against such backdoors. The US would like backdoors into everyone's communications, and doesn't want anyone else to have them. China would like backdoors into everyone's communications, and doesn't want anyone else to have them. Every country and jurisdiction would like backdoors into everyone's communications, and doesn't want anyone else to have them.
If it comes to pass that the department of justice insists on implementation of Exceptional access it would be who’ve the civil libertarians to work towards a better compromise. Hedge your bets.
Having exceptional access is important to keeping and improving society. It’s unethical to ignore and fight LE’s ongoing needs regarding such access. E2EE at scale, unchecked, is an extreme viewpoint with trade offs that I consider unethical at best, and fundamentally dangerous at worst.
As someone from ex comunist/socialist state, I am completely fine with LE not having too much power.
I think them being able to break all encryption in use is way too much power. Its not if, it's when it will be abused, and how many people die for it.
And LE's can do a lot more damage than all terrorist combined.
Current systems prevent most abuses, and many people are working on improving it to prevent more abuses.
As an excellent example, Certificate Transparency has almost completely mitigated the potential abuse of compromising a certificate authority and using it to MITM traffic. Similarly, "binary transparency" or "software transparency" will hopefully eliminate the abuse of delivering a "special binary" to just one person that others have not received.
Part of the threat model is the belief that any system with a backdoor has any hope of "preventing abuses". The backdoor is the abuse, leaving aside all the misuses of it that will happen.
It depends on whether the access is to be to encrypted data at rest or something like a realtime wiretap, and if there needs to be a way to prevent the spied-on party knowing they were being spied on or not.
One way to do data-at-rest (e.g. a locked phone) is to require physical access to the phone along with some kind of expensive, destructive procedure (e.g. an electron tunneling microscope and shaving away the housing of the secure enclave area).
Also, I'd assume that any competent target would just layer their own encryption on top of the existing stuff, so the whole system would only be good for catching unsophisticated criminals (and spying on the general public).
Or I'd just subpoena the iCloud backups and have Apple decrypt them, which they can already do.
>Programmer geniuses often can’t see the forest for the trees
Indeed, this is true. Likewise politicians often know nothing of how trees and forests actually work; and make absurd proposals which primarily serve their interests and pretend to care about a saving a few trees while endagering the entire forest.
Weakening everyone's security in order to weaken a small minority of criminals' security by default results in a net decrease in society's overall security