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Comment by taf2 | Hacker News Reader

So... the FBI is essentially arguing we should all keep our doors unlocked because they have had to do some investigations in the past where they came to a home that was locked and it was hard for them to enter the home.

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The FBI want to have a giant warehouse that houses a copy of every house key but we don't need to worry because no one will ever manage to break in to the warehouse.

And everyone with legitimate access to the warehouse will be 100% trustworthy no matter what for the entire span of time they are granted access, and nobody without legitimate access will ever be allowed in, even someone like a co-worker of someone with access, and even under the full supervision of someone with legitimate access.

An even stronger guarantee: That the definition of trustworthy and "good guy" are unchanging, and even in a dystopian future where a rogue actor is in control of government, those keys are safe because they understand the morality of the people who created them.

I'd say something to invoke Godwin's law, but it seems pretty clear that genocidal governments that sweep into power love having access to copious amounts of detailed records.

They don't even have to be genocidal; they could just be Richard Nixon.

Or Donald Trump.

The connection between outlawing maths and burning books doesn't take that much of a mental leap.

> And everyone with legitimate access to the warehouse will be 100% trustworthy no matter what for the entire span of time they are granted access

Of course. These are upstanding FBI agents we're talking about. There's no way one would ever cheat or steal or blackmail anyone.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/30/politics/federal-agents-charge...

It's worse than that. They want to ship those keys to their agents, only they'd arrive instantly and the only authentication is probably a password (their kid's name and birthday) with no human intervention.

I hate how we always have to tiptoe around saying that the primary threat would be a non-government actor breaking into the warehouse. I'm much more worried about the FBI itself having the keys.

With the key inside the warehouse, no one can get in.

Or that you can get a lock on your door, so long as it's one of a short list of locks where they have a spare key.

This has been tried, and works about as well as you might expect: https://theintercept.com/2015/09/17/tsa-doesnt-really-care-l...

The only reason they aren't actually advocating for exactly that is because it's easy for them to break into a locked home. If there were some new technology that made breaking into a house almost totally impossible, this is exactly what would happen.

Reality is waaayyy ahead of you.

https://chicagocrimelaw.wordpress.com/2008/07/28/this-week-i...

The FBI already has access to pretty much any locked door they want if they get a warrant. Their problem is that warrants don't work against encryption.

The front door is a less useful metaphor than your safe. We have safes in addition to locked front doors because it's accepted getting into the house is generally not that hard, whether you be law enforcement or a criminal.

A warrant is just as effective against nearly all safes. I have little doubt that if a safe was in FBI custody as long as the San Bernardino shooter's phone has been, the FBI would have been able to legally and physically get whatever was inside.

The FBI simply wants the digital world to mirror the physical world and a 100% unbreakable physical lock is almost impossible to produce in the physical world. It is easy to see why they would want that to be true in the digital world.

In this case, the digital world mirrors the physical world. Since this phone doesn't have secure enclave, they could trivially break into it. The fact that they've said they can't makes them liars. Very public liars. And are liars considered trustworthy?

https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-future/one-fbis-major-claims-...

[EDIT for added link]

> the FBI would have been able to legally and physically get whatever was inside.

What if the safe has a self-destruct mechanism for the contents in case of breach?

And what if government agencies bought that safe to handle classified material because it was certified to have met or exceeded the standards for handling such data. Then the FBI forces the safe manufacturer to make a way to get into the safe. Now the other agency can come after the manufacturer for lying to them during the procurement process because there is demonstrably a way for an unauthorized person to break into the safe.

My parents worked for the NSA before there was an NSA. A guy came in to do a talk about how there is no such thing as security. He had a table with a bunch of common locks and even some safes. He proceeded to unlock each one in a matter of seconds to demonstrate his point.

Modern encryption however is changing the game. It's no longer true that security is just a matter of perception. It's becoming a reality and that makes for an interesting and bold new world we're entering.

Maybe, but the game is still the same. There are weak points for encryption just as there were weak points with the safe that he unlocked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency#World...

What did they do?

It's a secret - break codes and write code, ;). While the NSA was started in the 50s it was not widely known until the 70s https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/timeline

Getting in a safe is also not that hard if you're the FBI, I think. I'm pretty sure that every safe can be cracked in a day or two without destroying whatever is inside.

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