Comment by FreedomToCreate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FreedomToCreate | Hacker News Reader

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FreedomToCreate

A few things. If you want to make your argument legit, refrain from calling the other person names. Second, besides drinking and making yourself essentially useless, what are you doing to improve this situation. One person may not be enough to make a difference but its better than zero.

America is entirely being driven by fear and anger. The current presidential race is a perfect reflection of the hate, anger, and fear that Americans believe exists. The system is a reflection of what the "good" people allow to happen.

The FBI has a job, and Apple has a commitment to its customers. Technology is going to get more advanced, does that mean that we should let it be a tool to obstruct justice. You may not trust the people tasked with the investigation, but people should also look at the fact that the encryption here is obstructing justice.

Tomorrow if a criminal kidnaps a bus of school children and the police are able to get a hold of a locked phone that holds their location, would you be as opposed to the current situation?

The creation of a method to disable the phones encryption is a slippery road, but the option of not aiding the FBI is also a slippery road. This is a organization created to protect the people.

We need to have a open discourse on how the information can be taken off this phone while minimizing the loss of public security and privacy . This is not a black and white issue like many people are treating it.

And just to make it clear, I do agree that the government has done extremely questionable things as well as committed offenses against the publics privacy. We need to fix the issue of distrust, because a lack of trust in our system is equal to cancer within a body.

Counterpoint: Just going out on a limb here, but I'm pretty sure James Comey isn't leafing through Hacker News reading our arguments. If he'd like to have a civil discussion, I'd be more than happy to bring the civility.

Second, our system is essentially set up to make me powerless. It's actually engineered that way. I do what I can to educate people around me, but when it comes to voting or having any control over who's in office or who officiates our most important government positions, the ball's not just not in our court, it's on another planet.

Technology, as you said, will continue to get much more advanced. I reckon at some point, literally every moment of our lives will be perfectly catalogued, from birth to death. This is why what Mr. Comey wants scares me so much, because you can practically hear him salivating in that letter.

We have guarantees built into our constitutional freedoms, and one of the most important guarantees is that the government can't compel us to do things. Sure, there are laws to maintain the peace and common order, but you don't have to house or attend to military in your home, you don't have to testify against yourself, you're not compelled by police to follow their wishes until you're under arrest (which they ostensibly can't do without probable cause), and you don't have to aide in an investigation if you're not involved. These are vital because the moment we're legally compelled to aide investigators, all bets are off. We are no longer able to even protect ourselves against undue search and seizure.

I agree with you. The motives of those with access to this information is questionable and being forced to do things impedes personal liberty, but the people who wrote the constitution could have never imagined this type of situation. It quite literally requires an in-depth discussion by the people and those we trust in power to develop a solution, but the idea that no backdoor will ever exists is not realistic.

Look at history. The encryption the Nazis had created helped them commit terrible acts of war and it was the backdoor the Allies discovered that helped bring justice to them.

I'm being devils advocate here because I don't people should view this as "us vs them". Comey may seem like he is salivating to you, but he does raise the notion that at the other end is a corporation, who also has an agenda.

> Look at history. The encryption the Nazis had created helped them commit terrible acts of war and it was the backdoor the Allies discovered that helped bring justice to them.

Are you suggesting the Nazi's were the only ones to use encryption during World War II?

You forgot to mention at least 9 other nations (including the USA)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_cryptography

My point is to show how encryption in the wrong hands can also have terrible consequences.

This is a two way street.

> encryption in the wrong hands can also have terrible consequences.

So can literally anything in the wrong hands, though.

Cars, cellphones, fertilizer, kitchen knives, baseball bats, apple seeds, etc. Encryption is only special because of the power dynamic that shifts in the average citizens favour.

I actually wouldn't bet on that. As much as I dislike the FBI based on previous behaviour, I'm happy Comey is running it now, because he seems to have a fair amount of personal integrity. I wouldn't rule it out completely that on a matter this politically charged and visible he does some homework himself, and HN would be one of the first places to start.

> the encryption here is obstructing justice

No, it isn't. The phone they're trying to break into was the shooter's work phone, provided by his employer. He physically destroyed his personal phone before the acts in question. The idea that he kept relevant information on his work phone, which he left intact, is absurd.

There is a probability that it may not contain anything, but this fact doesn't disprove the notion that encryption can be used to obstruct justice in future cases.

(What the probability is though is hard for me to predict as I don't have enough information, but assuming he didn't have any slip ups on his work phone is a bad assumption. If there is a 1 percent chance that future attacks of similar scope could be prevented by knowledge gathered about this case, is it not our obligation to find out? Its a complex issue that the courts and media will play out over the next few months)

I'm against the FBI's actions here, but your argument against it doesn't make sense.

Did the shooter take the phone with him when meeting with accomplices? If so, perhaps there's GPS info on the phone.

What are the gaps in standard behavior (i.e. phone turned off...). Are these times where the FBI should dig deeper to discover the actions of the shooter?

The idea that bulk collection of metadata is objectionable is something we're seeing in civilized technical circles. Individual collection of the same is even worse.

It is not a matter of trust. People should never simply trust their Government, rather, Government must be accountable to the People. This particular government has not merely done "extremely questionable" things, they have knowingly and willingly broken the law and violated the privacy of just about every American because they believed the means justified the ends.

Of course encryption will obstruct justice in some cases. The same applies equally to the 4th amendment. Sometimes criminals will escape justice because the means to identify them are simply not reasonable. Obstructing justice is not always considered a bad thing. Where we draw the line is crucially important.

The law demands that the particulars of the crime are irrelevant. We must accept that whatever capability we give police can be deployed, with probable cause, in any criminal investigation. So I'll completely ignore your hypothetical case. If bypassing encryption is possible, then bypassing encryption becomes routine. Apple was routinely tasked under the AWA to assist in recovering phone data prior to them deploying encryption which they believed they could not crack.

Worse still is the fact that all police powers will be, at times, abused by the police. So another important question is are you comfortable with this capability being used disproportionately against the poor and marginalized, being used to harass and intimidate, and being used to suppress political dissent?

I believe the police must be capable of working with some limitations on their ability to access our personal electronic devices. Compelling manufacturers to create backdoors in our devices to bypass their security might help the police solve cases, but it would do at an unacceptable risk to the security and privacy of everyone who uses those devices. Generally available and widely usable encryption is a vital national interest. It is the linchpin enabling trillions of dollars of electronic commerce. Even if you dilude yourself into thinking the backdoor would only be lawfully accessed, its mere existence would inflict real economic damage by furthering global distrust of American technology. And it would set the stage for even more troubling backdoors in the future, because the All Writs Act is the wrong legal framework for them to get it.

Under the AWA, how is compelling the creation of this backdoor any different from compelling creation of any software which might produce evidence of co-conspirators? If tomorrow the FBI wants access to an iPhone 6s's camera and microphone, or the ability to remotely download the phone's contents? What if the FBI needs Mozilla to install a backdoor in the Tor Browser Bundle? How can the AWA grant one backdoor and not the other?

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