"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
Does this right to expression apply to data at rest?
> "[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
This should be amended to include data but from a legal standpoint it should stand that information/communications that are stored/accessed locally on a personal computer fall under 'effects'.
Backdooring into your computer without prior authorization and/or the justification backed by a warrant is illegal and a violation of the rights of US citizens.
To say I don't have a right to use encryption is to say I don't have a right to speak things that other can't understand. And I see: it's not my fault you don't understand.
If you want access to encrypted information, break the encryption. Outsmart me. Don't make it illegal for me to outsmart you.
You have the right to communicate freely -> encryption is just a form of (ostensibly garbled) communication -> you have the right to use encryption freely.
Nothing in that clause says the communication must be understandable or even interpretable by all people.
I don't think outlawing maths or outlawing companies from making an iPhone that they themselves can't break into is even remotely possible. The conclusion from that is that what we have can't really be a war on crypto, it must simply be the noise of people who realized they already lost.
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Freedom of the press and of speech should have been extended to electronic communications. But they have, so far, not been.
> demand that encryption is a fundamental right just as
> freedom of speech is a fundamental right
Why should the content of your electronic data be more protected than the content of the paperwork (bank records, health records, etc) in your home?
The electronic data is a lot richer and more personal than just documents. It's more like an extension of your brain, than an extension of your home.
It also features live incoming personal and private data from friends, family, and other contacts who may be put in danger if their information (location, for example) is exposed to unsavory people. (Note, governments can and do sometimes have unsavory people working alongside the good people.)
To the extent that encryption protects all this information, yes it should be considered as much a right as the right to have private thoughts, which seems to be fairly widely accepted.
I guess my point was that it doesn't seem prima facie to me that your electronic data is more privileged than your non-electronic data is all, and your non-electronic data is certainly subject to warrant
The files are in a state which is extremely difficult to work with, for the express purpose of preventing their access even with a warrant. Is that obstruction of justice? It would be with a shredder or a safe wired to burn papers if forced open.
In a very real sense, crypto is such a freedom.
I don't think that's something that governments can accept, in the long term.
The reality is the more you pass the keys to this sort of thing around the greater the risks.
EDIT:
Since I'm rate limited...
You do realize the Freedom of Speech was literally created to enable political dissent that used to involve criminal acts?
http://www.lectlaw.com/files/con01.htm
> The inhabitants of the North American colonies did not have a legal right to express opposition to the British government that ruled them. Nonetheless, throughout the late 1700s, these early Americans did voice their discontent with the Crown. For example, they strongly denounced the British parliament's enactment of a series of taxes to pay off a large national debt that England had incurred in its Seven Years War with France. In newspaper articles, pamphlets and through boycotts, the colonists raised what would become their battle cry: "No taxation without representation!" And in 1773, the people of the Massachusetts Bay Colony demonstrated their outrage at the tax on tea in a dramatic act of civil disobedience: the Boston Tea Party.
> The colonies' most celebrated seditious libel prosecution was that of John Peter Zenger in 1735. Zenger, publisher of the 'New York Weekly Journal', had printed a series of scathing criticisms of New York's colonial governor. Although the law was against Zenger, a jury found him not guilty -- in effect, nullifying the law and expressing both the jurors' contempt for British rule and their support for a free and unfettered press. After Zenger's acquittal, the British authorities abandoned seditious libel prosecutions in the colonies, having concluded that such prosecutions were no longer an effective tool of repression.
key word: used to.
The people, via the vehicle of the government, collectively decided to make those acts legal, thus giving people the freedom to commit legal, non-criminal acts of speech, which were 1. legal, and 2. not illegal.
It is trivially easy for anyone not emotionally invested in failing to understand it, to understand how this is different from giving people the freedom to commit acts that everybody agrees are illegal, should be illegal, and should stay illegal, just because apple has figured out how to engineer a product 100% immune to government scrutiny.
I could have, and did have, devices 100% immune to government scrutiny before the iPhone existed. So, you go ahead and believe that if you want. It isn't true in any real sense beyond popular history that isn't rooted in reality.
Similarly, encryption doesn't give you the ability to commit those acts. I have the ability to commit those acts without encryption. Your logic can be used to ban everything from guns to crowbars to cars.
You can't simply ban tools because you feel people use them criminally. That works literally 0 times because the criminals are simply going to keep using the tools anyway.
> The people, via the vehicle of the government, collectively decided to make those acts legal, thus giving people the freedom to commit legal, non-criminal acts of speech, which were 1. legal, and 2. not illegal.
Yes. That doesn't change the principle was based upon the right to rebel via speech against the Government. That principle hasn't changed since the founding. Removing the ability to communicate privately removes the ability to dissent privately.
You are a very short term thinker and operate under the assumption it'll be used solely in truly important and critical criminal investigations. That is not the case historically with this sort of power. This power also provides you with essentially nothing in return for giving up that ability to act privately.
France had the power to stop the terrorist attacks and has everything the people in power in the US ask for, they failed [despite being warned by a friendly government about some of the attackers].
What exactly do you expect to get out of this?
If you think that it is, then you think I've said something I haven't said.
Right to true encryption is tantamount to right to perfect privacy, including privacy for committing crimes. This has been the current situation if true crypto was properly used for a while but we seem to be moving into a world beyond that - where such crypto is available to anyone who purchases a mobile phone and configures a few options.
I believe (and I would assume you do to) that widespread encryption is the preferable choice over key escrow, but let's not pretend that ready accessible consumer hard encryption doesn't fundamentally alter the balance between government and its citizens (including in some morally questionable ways).
It has existed for centuries. Ease of access isn't some magical balance of power altering problem.
People can break encryption through various attacks [Keyloggers, observing people entering their keycodes, etc]. The government should have to go that route too, just like they do to break into literally everything else. They hire a professional.
Encryption isn't some magical shield and is breakable without attacking it directly.
http://www.wired.com/2012/11/ff-the-manuscript/
> For more than 260 years, the contents of that page—and the details of this ritual—remained a secret. They were hidden in a coded manuscript, one of thousands produced by secret societies in the 18th and 19th centuries. At the peak of their power, these clandestine organizations, most notably the Freemasons, had hundreds of thousands of adherents, from colonial New York to imperial St. Petersburg. Dismissed today as fodder for conspiracy theorists and History Channel specials, they once served an important purpose: Their lodges were safe houses where freethinkers could explore everything from the laws of physics to the rights of man to the nature of God, all hidden from the oppressive, authoritarian eyes of church and state. But largely because they were so secretive, little is known about most of these organizations. Membership in all but the biggest died out over a century ago, and many of their encrypted texts have remained uncracked, dismissed by historians as impenetrable novelties.
This is where we disagree. What you've enumerated are attacks of convenience against a cryptographic implementation, not cryptography itself. And this is exactly what ease of access dramatically shifts.
The real twist isn't that Apple is suddenly providing quality encryption. We've had unbreakable encryption since the first one-time pad. IMHO, the FBI et al. didn't care because a statistically relevant number of people didn't use it. The twist is that Apple suddenly packaged that up into a consumer device with a quality implementation and all the hard details handled. And the FBI et al. do care because a very statistically relevant number of people use iPhones.
So yes, ease of access is a balance altering change. Because really, I don't think the government cares if hard encryption exists: it cares if lots of people use it.
That is how you break into vaults, fyi.
You can encrypt something that will need hypothetical quantum computers / processing until the heat death of the universe to decrypt without the key.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/8017041/MI6-Q...
> When forty spectators assembled for an outdoor trial, they reported that the safe seemed to be “on the point of explosion” and the gas issuing out of holes in the bottom of the safe meant it was “lifted some inches off the ground” forcing observes to retire to a “place of safety behind the building.”
Nothing really prevents you from having a safe that after N failed attempts from destroying the contents with explosives.
I would hope that a number of laws prohibit my carrying on my person a small safe filled with explosives and a known-effective trigger. Hypothetically, we could create such a safe.
Practically, however, we could not create one that would be as easily and broadly used as an iPhone. Therefore, the nature of the social question presented by a perfectly secure (for all intents and purposes, or at least a future iteration that is) mass market device is fairly novel.
Shouldn't we stop pussyfooting around this issue and instead demand that encryption is a fundamental right just as freedom of speech is a fundamental right?
Since everything we say and do today involves computers and the Internet, we can't have free speech, privacy, liberty, or personal security without encryption.
We should assert that right. We should have the right to use encryption for our communications and to secure our documents at rest, and never be compelled to reveal a key or passphrase. Doesn't this sound like something that would have been in the Bill of Rights if it were written today?
We can still mention all the other reasons why encryption is good and beneficial, but always starting our conversations with the words: encryption is a fundamental right.