Security vs privacy is a false dichotomy here. Backdoors can help law enforcement achieve some goals but weaken overall security. The debate is security vs security, and framing it any other way reflects either willful deceit or ignorance.
You are wrong in framing the debate as security vs security. Its like everything else when it comes to liberty and protection. The question is how much liberty are we willing to give up for protection. We can't let a corporation or the government anchor our opinions on the left or right.
Also I believe even without the citation that the notion that criminals can use encryption to protect themselves is pretty obvious.
Is the end goal no longer total information awareness? [0]
Side note: that was a rather scathing and slanted article you cited. It would have been nice to see the simple facts of the case presented in a neutral light.
Yet we don't cripple the effectiveness of these items for the sake of preventing crime. Doing so would only harm the quality of lives of the vast majority of innocent people who we trust to use these thing for their own benefit as free citizitens of a free country.
But investigators can get access to basements, cars, knives and guns and use them to solve the crime. In this case, post-crime, there is no way to gather information that could be important.
Which is irrelevant to how these individual items are used to actually prevent the crime from being solved.
While encryption prevents access to information that may or may not be useful, guns are used to kill witnesses that are never found, shovels are used to burry bodies that take decades to find, cars are impounded or destroyed after a getaway, I could go on. Often enough, even if any of these items are found, it doesn't help solve the crime because the criminal was simply too smart.
I fail to see why encryption is being treated differently than any other legal thing we, as free and innocent citizens, have access to. The cynic in me believes the only actual difference is in the level of familiarity the majority of the voting population has with this particular legal thing. They seem to have, unfortunately, been misinformed and poorly educated about this issue and technology in general.
Technically, there is some limited middle ground due to key escrow (clipper chip[1]) or cryptographic backdoors (DUAL_EC_DRBG[2]).
Both are interesting because the encryption algorithms stay mathematically strong.
Obviously, the golden keys would have to be well-protected. But that's mostly a solved problem; see CAs.
(Of course there's the problem of which governments get the keys. And it's good that Clipper and DUAL_EC_DRBG died.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG
That's fine with me. The actions of the few does not justify the loss of privacy for all.
> Most people won't understand till it impacts them personally but imagine if you are robbed of all your money and the answer of who did it lies in a computer you are able to get your hand on. Wouldn't you love it if the police had a backdoor now.
No, I don't. Because that means the police can get into my data at any given time without any oversight and without me ever knowing it. It also means that anyone could attack my system and get that money as well.
I've been in this situation many times in the past, I've lost a lot of sensitive data because I forgot the password to my encrypted DMG files and I've moved on and I still encrypt my stuff in the DMG files.
Do I think the police and others should have a backdoor into my DMG files? No, and there is absolutely nothing that will ever justify it, not even terrorism or even the life of my family.
More Americans have been killed by Americans in the past few years than the entire history of terrorist attacks combined.
How about we take actions to ban guns in the country and see how it works.
> The question is how much liberty are we willing to give up for protection.
None. I don't deserve protection if I don't care about my privacy.
> We can't let a corporation or the government anchor our opinions on the left or right.
Sure we can, by voting and with our money. People trust Apple because they do focus on security of their devices.
It was the same thing with RIM/BlackBerry.