| > Governments (good ones!) are rightly complaining that criminals are using encryption to commit particularly awful crimes. For starter I don't know a lot of good governments. So you'll have to define how you differentiate between a good one and a bad one. > Governments (good ones!) are rightly complaining that criminals are using encryption to commit particularly awful crimes. Secondly, criminals use public transport and roads built with taxpayer money to commit crime. Some even say that they breathe the same air as us honest citizens. They also live in homes with 4 walls that you can't see through either. I am being facetious but you can see where I am going with this. If you think that the governments will stop at spying on criminals once this backdoor is in place, then I have a bridge to sell you. Do you want your kids to grow in world were everything they do online will be analyzed, categorized and reviewed by some random government employee somewhere? What if this government turns bad in the future as it has happened countless times in the past? What do you do then? > I feel we should as a community support is some fine-grained legal process that would allow limited access to user information if justified by a warrant. The problem with this line of thinking is that it doesn't hold up in the real world. Once you grant access to something like say your browser history to the government or any entity, what's to stop them to ask for more next time? It's not a big deal right, they can say, well you gave us access to A, now we want access to B. Then in 3 years they will come back demanding access to C, D and E until your entire privacy has been taken away from you. And every time, they will use the same excuses, fighting crime, fighting drugs, child grooming and terrorism. > Competent jurisdictions allow this for physical search and seizure. That is not even remotely comparable. In those cases, you need a judge or someone to approve the seizure. With a backdoor that can be opened at any time, you should consider that nothing will be private because there is no one who is going to be monitoring it 24/7 to make sure that there are no abuses. |
I'm not sure you've read what I wrote correctly. My hypothetical system would not allow the backdoor to be opened at any time, but it would require a certificate to be issued (derived from the manufacturer / application creator's root) that gives limited, expiring access on the production of court-authorised warrant, in exactly the same way a judge gives the police permission to enter your physical property.