If Snowden was able to purloin all those documents, then an unknown number of others were able to do the same. We don’t know how many others purloined government secrets and exploited them discreetly (e.g. selling secret government backdoors to the Russian Mafia, perhaps) rather than kicking off a public display of whistle-blowing.
In the unlikely case that Snowden was the only one who smuggled secrets out of the files, I guess we’re just lucky he had benevolent motives.
Ah - so the news of all our covert agents being rounded up overseas and arrested is probably going to hit the news soon, because the government can’t keep a secret from the Russian Mafia, which probably has the nuclear command and control codes, too.
Who knows whether the government can keep secrets from the Russian Mafia or anyone else?
Fortunately, Apple and Google have made the question irrelevant as far as future smartphone privacy is concerned.
Snowden revealed that the US engages on monitoring, intercepting, and spying on US citizens in far broader manner than was previously known. This is an indication that the public should not trust the government to reveal the extent to which the government will engage in this type of behavior.
Sure, and if they judge that they can sell more phones by telling you that your browsing habits will be protected from the zero people who actually care what you are doing, as opposed to offering rare and judicially-directed assistance to help put murderers, bank robbers, rapists, drug dealers, and other felons in jail – well, they do have a responsibility to their shareholders, as opposed to society.
I think this is outside the scope of this thread, but you seem to have a lot of faith in the justice system. Warrants are probably mostly issued properly, but there are warrants that are not. Some are defective for whatever reason, or mistaken. FISA warrant requests are rejected less than 0.05% of the time. Getting a warrant seems more like a rubber stamp than anything else.
I have been telling you for several pages now that my main concern is how this would impact police investigating the types of crimes I mentioned. How much clearer can I possibly be that I am not talking about FISA?
The Supreme Court recently unanimously ruled that police require a warrant before searching a suspect’s phone. That’s a very good ruling. But as I mentioned before, one of the cases that brought this matter to the Supreme Court was a search of a cell phone that revealed that the suspect – who had been detained for some inconsequential matter – was a gang member who had a hand in a murder. The evidence on the phone connected him to the crime. I fully acknowledge that technology is changing in ways to make these searches (even when blessed by a judge) an endangered species, but, like Comey, I lament that so many people can’t get over their crush on Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and the like to simply recognize that (a) it isn’t unreasonable to have a well-regulated search of electronic technology, and (b) the products of those lawful searches can be essential to putting really bad people in jail.
I’ve been thinking recently about how technology is making society communicate so much better, and yet people are becoming so much more self-absorbed. The idea that people are actually out to look at some random schmo’s email about their cats is probably more evidence of narcissism and paranoia rather than actual evidence of a police state that needs to be feared.
The root of the whole situation is distrust of government as a result of its pattern of behavior (some long known, some recently revealed). To declare that you are not going to talk about FISA makes you look as silly as a naval architect who refuses to talk about water or a biochemist who refuses to talk about carbon.
If we consider the matter within some abstract realm of Platonic ideals, divorced from the messy minutiae of history, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that we would be better off if people were required to show that they weren’t as dumb and ignorant as a bag of rocks before we let them vote. Of course, in the real world, such a policy is outside the realm of serious consideration, because those “messy minutiae of history” include too many abuses dressed up in the veneer of this concept.
The same situation occurs here. Even if you could somehow convince anybody that you’re right on the abstract merits of the surveillance issue, you need to recognize that you’re carrying too much historical baggage to get very far.
See, this is just what I mean. Anyone with any awareness of the government’s record of misusing its powers would know better than to try such an inane attempt at trivialization.
You may be excluding FISA warrants from your commentary - but this tech will protect against those as well, no? Similarly, while you are focusing on legal searches, this tech will prevent all unauthorized searches as well. It’s important to note that yes there is a cost involved in encryption related to thwarted or delayed investigations, but there is a benefit as well. Do you see that?
While it’s a good thing that a murderer was able to be captured, identified, etc., I am simultaneously opposed to fishing expeditions and a police state where these searches would be common place. A search incident to arrest is widely accepted - how long before that includes all data that is included in someone’s phone? A simple arrest shouldn’t be the gateway to rummage through all of your data as well as any other system that is connected to that phone remotely. It’s not like there isn’t wide spread occurrence of police deleting video that paints them in a bad light from user devices upon arrest.
That’s not what we are presented with here - and any possibility of that occurring is nipped in the bud by this type of encryption.
Apple has disclosed that it receives literally ten times more requests for assisting police than for anything related to national security. Your fixation on FISA is what is out of proportion here, along with the assumption that anything that says FISA means bad scary government boogeyman out to get innocent Americans. It’s rather silly, if one were to stop and think about it.
To me, this seems like it only really matters to people outside of the US government’s reach, ie. foreigners. The more I think about it, the more I think that domestically, having the strong encryption is a good thing for the government.
Think about it: If the guy’s guilty and doesn’t give up his data, defying a subpoena, he goes to jail until he does. And if he does, the prosecution gets the data and he goes to jail because the information is damning.
On the other hand, if its an innocent party and they don’t give up the data, defying court orders, he goes to jail until he does. If he does give it up, he goes free, as he should be.
Either the person goes to jail, or he gives up the data and is innocent. I suppose the times when this formula might have a bug in it is if the person going to jail is innocent and everyone knows he is, and he goes to jail willingly by keeping the data secured, protecting someone else. How often does that happen?
Also, routine deployment of strong security (including, but not limited to, strong encryption) makes the government’s job a lot easier by preventing many crimes from happening in the first place, and complicating the task of laundering the proceeds of crimes that aren’t directly impeded by cybersecurity.
That brings us to what I suspect is the real bottom-line motivation – Apple has invested a great deal of money and brand cred in the Apple Pay rollout, and then they got a big black eye from the Fappening mess. They need to establish the iThingy’s credibility as a secure platform. Trolling the Feds (who, post-Snowden, are basically seen as criminal hackers in suits and ties by a large percentage of the population) into setting their hair on fire like this is a straightforward way of doing that. It also comes with the fringe benefit of divesting themselves of the legal meeble of responding to requests (legitimate or otherwise).
The formula has a bug because courts tend to rule that not giving out a password is a Fifth Amendment right (though that isn’t settled law). Under that interpretation of the Fifth Amendment, neither suspect would be going to jail because they have a right to defy the warrant.
That’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Nobody should be thrown in a hole just for refusing to speak and incriminate themselves – that’s something only tyrants do. You may as well argue that the Eighth Amendment shouldn’t be applied too strictly when it comes to applying rubber-hose decryption in cases where it seems the government has a strong interest in peeking at someone’s data.
Maybe you should try to keep up with the class before raising your hand next time.
This type of rhetoric isn’t helpful. In any case, as to the first example the order to reveal the password was lifted, and in the second example the order to reveal the password was mooted. So Ravenman’s statement is largely correct.
The whole point is that there never was an order to reveal the password.
In any case, neither of your links is terribly helpful to Ravenman’s case – the first is about a situation where the police obtained the information just fine, and the second confirms that a warrant can require the production of the specific information sought (but not the password used to encrypt it).
Just to be perfectly clear here before I respond with my own cites: is it your position that a defendant can be lawfully compelled to produce all data that is encrypted on their electronic devices?
So if you are arrested and the police obtain a warrant for the contents of your cell phone, absent any unusual circumstances, are you saying that you would not fight that warrant on Fourth and Fifth Amendment grounds?
The case law is that the specific data demanded by a warrant must be produced. A hypothetical warrant for “all your stuff” runs into the obvious problem of being precisely the sort of “general warrant” the Fourth Amendment was written to prohibit.
Again, you get arrested. The police get a warrant for things stored on your smart phone. Do you provide what they are asking for, or do you fight the warrant on Fourth and Fifth Amendment grounds? No need to fight the hypothetical here.