The Only Safe Phone Is One Even the Police Can't Unlock

If you need to explain to non-technical friends and family exactly why this is a terrible idea, CGP Grey offers an easily digestible 5-minute primer: ▶ this video Computers either have unbreakable locks, or no locks whatsoever. There's no stable middle ground.

> The FBI asked Apple to put a build on a phone that would allow them to brute force the passcode, leaving the device and the build on Apple's premises the entire time. It doesn't matter how well it might be locked down or secured. If the government coerced them into building it, it wouldn't be difficult to go one more step and require apple to hand over the modified OS. This [1] does a great job of explaining why building a master key is just a bad idea. This is a pandora's box we do not need to open. [1] ▶ this video

Yes. ▶ this video is a pretty good video for persuading people why this legislation is a bad idea. We might still be able to beat it by rallying support.

If you have five minutes, please see this short video from CGPGrey, which summarizes succinctly why access to your phone is akin to access to brain: > ▶ this video

It doesn't seem like trustworthy governments is the issue. You can't have backdoors period because they'll be leaked / discovered and used by bad actors. ▶ this video

That analogy breaks because a home's locked door as the constaint that it can effectively only be visited by someone coming to that door physically. On the internet, multiple crimimals can attack all doors at all times ▶ this video

maybe not relevant here but my first thought to your question out of context is scale. My house can be easy entered by anyone determined to enter it. They can bust the door down, break the windows, crash a vehicle into it. And yet, almost no one is actually trying to get into my house. Conversely, 1000s of people and possibly hundreds of thousands of bots are trying to break into any software they can that is exposed on the internet (or possibly exposed in other ways like I have no idea if every app on my PC/Mac/Phone/Tablet is scanning my network for devices with known exploits) So, the security of my house (at least where I live) does not have to be so resilient but the security of much of my software does. ▶ this video

> The entire US constitution is built on the premise that people have rights. As much as I'm near-absolutist on civil liberties, I think it's also valuable to recognize that the intrinsic good of individual rights are only one part of the story; the other is the balance of power between government and the governed. I recently heard Sam Harris opine that from a utilitarian perspective, an absolutist right to privacy pales in comparison to allowing harm to come to children, and so the tech community needs to flex a little on the privacy question, and meet law enforcement halfway. Through that reductionist lens, it's hard to find fault in the argument. The problem isn't limited to privacy, though. Unbreakable digital locks exist, and they aren't going anywhere. [0] And there is power in the ability to keep secrets. You can bet the Feds have little interest in a Panopticon, where they too are obstructed from keeping digital secrets, as "meeting us halfway" for some greater good. Rather, they want to hoard that asymmetric power as their exclusive purview. No matter how well-intentioned, that asymmetry of raw power is something We The People have a vested interest in taking seriously, far beyond some abstract notion of "I want to Google ${CONSENTING_ADULT_SEXUAL_ACTIVITY} without worrying the neighbors will find out". [0] ▶ this video

As much as guns have grown deadlier since 2A was penned, they ultimately scaled linearly; we don't currently have weapons available to citizens which can destroy a city. If the police need to counter a citizen's misuse of guns, they can easily deploy 10x guns of their own. This used to be true of secrets: if there was a legitimate reason for police to crack a safe, it was difficult, but possible. But with encryption, you no longer need 10x force; you need closer to (10^100)x force (not an expert, but close enough for illustration). What's neglected/forgotten is that weakened crypto creates a power asymmetry in the other direction : while there's no way to scale safe-cracking to (10^100), such that the feds can auto-crack every safe at will, that is absolutely feasible for digital locks, if those locks are forced to be arbitrarily weak. The NSA would have the resources to pre-crack and cache every single encrypted signal, "just in case". The nature of the mathematical asymmetry leaves no middle ground: either every citizen has access to unbreakable locks, or no one will [0] (except for the Feds themselves, of course): ▶ this video [0] There is one cogent comparison to the arguments of 2A advocates here: "if you outlaw crypto, only outlaws have crypto". In fact, it's even worse: hypothetically the feds can track gun-running, and guns are (currently) non-trivial to manufacture oneself. But all it takes is a small snippet of GitHub code and/or a white paper to craft an unbreakable loc