Going after systems that have over a million users would leave a pretty big loophole for niche vendors and open source. But with such a big precedent, those could easily be targeted later.
First, anything that has more than a gig of memory and sells over a million units must be engineered according to the government's whims. That is pretty much ANYTHING useful nowadays. Hardware will now spy on you. And even though there is old hardware, and theoretically zero-trust programming techniques out there, that won't matter because:
They will go after open-source projects.
Any single method alone wouldn't work, but if pushed all at once, they could smother us. File lawsuits against and harass not just maintainers, but contributors and possibly even users; force registrars to de-register domains, and search engines to forget links; have ISP's stop allowing Tor connections, or possibly even implement whitelists of all websites instead of blacklists of "bad" ones.
Without secure computers, in today's world, there is no organized protest; there is no organized opposition; there is no truly effectual dissent, because the other side can see all and end it before it becomes an issue. And even then... gestures wildly.
Constitutionality means jack without both belief and enforcement. We have neither; a public split and jaded, and a government empowered in the worst possible way. And even if this doesn't pass - and that is a horrifyingly small if - the very fact that this is even being proposed is evidence that the battle is close to being lost completely. There is no second chance in this chase, and we are going to trip and fall eventually.
Though hope may be lost for us, may we retain hope that our descendants are at least somewhat at peace with the world we have given them.
All lawsuits are in the jurisdiction of X Tribunal, situated in Switzerland or another privacy-friendly country?
Anyway, as a Canadian, one of my key takeaways from watching it is that it doesn’t matter what country you’re in, nor your nationality, nor the nation where you’re committing crimes; if the FBI or similar large agency decides to target you, you’re going to at a minimum have a really bad time, and very potentially end up getting a free trip to the US to spend time in jail, even if you’ve never stepped foot in the country before.
The show has this “look at how far we’re willing to go to keep America safe!” vibe to it, but as an outsider I found it pretty horrifying.
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declassified_(TV_series)
That means a possible end to a whole range of international agreements and treaties, and a fragmented world where anything is possible, somewhere, now that there is no chance of global consensus about anything at all. I'm waiting patiently for the international consensus for protection of "intellectual property" to break down. Plenty of countries take a net loss from it, and without the carrot of access to international trade systems like the WTO, if such are discontinued, they won't have an incentive to continue with it.
Smaller just don't have to do it proactive, but can be required to do it later.
> the Attorney General can simply command it to build one, using what’s called an “assistance capability directive.” (If it does already have that capability, the AG can use the directive to command it to maintain it.) That isn’t limited to the million-plus club; any provider can be served with such a directive. That is, the “big” providers have to proactively design for decryptability, and the “little guys” with less than a million U.S. users better gird their loins