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0 pointssnowwrestler6y ago0 comments

> For all intents and purposes, encryption is a unbreakable lock that can serve to perfectly hide valuable criminal evidence.

This doesn't matter. Our rights are not premised on the ultimate physical availability of any given piece of information. There's no "we can always break into the safe" provision of the 4th Amendment.

Fundamentally, the government does not have the right to any piece of your information. A warrant grants them the temporary right to employ certain techniques to try to get it.

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snowwrestlerOP6y ago

I'm going to reply to myself and also point out that we don't require safe makers to make "breakable" safes.

Safe manufacturers make the strongest safes they can, and in parallel, the government develops their own capabilities to attack those safes to execute warrants.

The same thing is true for encryption. At its base theory, encryption is just math--but it is implemented in software, and software is imperfect. The government can, and does, attack devices to break encryption systems to get what it needs.

In fact, the Justice Department Inspector General found that the FBI did not go far enough in trying this, before it tried to sue Apple in 2016. And ultimately the FBI did get into that iPhone by breaking it.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

snowwrestlerOP6y ago

I'm going to reply to myself and also point out that we don't require safe makers to make "breakable" safes.

Safe manufacturers make the strongest safes they can, and in parallel, the government develops their own capabilities to attack those safes to execute warrants.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse