I think we've all been so scared by all the dragnet activity the NSA/FBI have been conducting that we want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
With encryption, any solution I've seen suggested has the risk of mass use by the government in addition to allowing other people besides the government to use it.
It is arguably baked into the nature of policing that such institutions will over-reach their authority and attempt to consolidate it. Usually for all the right motivations, but they have systematic blinders to the unintended consequences and risks. For this reason, there must be effective counterbalances, and demonstrably court and board oversight is insufficient.
Hence it is important that for some actions that police are legally enabled to do, they remain too expensive (in time, manpower, money, whatever) to do habitually or without thought and prioritization.
Pretty much any technological advantage that facilitates parallel construction should probably be resisted for this reason.
Different societies have figured out the issues differently.
In some societies, you get killed for being gay, for example. Or for having the wrong kind of sex. Or for not following a certain religion. Or for saying the wrong things. So... you want to hand the power to that society to peer into the minds of anyone, and do whatever the majority thinks should be done?
You are advocating for tools to enable a tyranny of the majority. Instead of letting society figure it out for you, how about allowing each person to have their own freedom?
Unfortunately, that's not reality. Each citizen complies with the laws of his/her own country. So do companies.
There is no global law concerning these issues, so companies with a presence in country X are bound to country X's laws. It doesn't mean country Y's law are great and/or should be the common denominator.
Actually no. Each subject complies with the laws of "their" country up to the limit of enforcement. When enough people disobey, social change occurs.
What the establishment is advocating is to move these limits of enforcement down to the level of individuals' thoughts. This isn't surprising, as their power deludes them into forgetting that laws follow society, and not vice-versa.
Imagine the setting of a century ago. A homosexual travels across a border, at which point their actions from the past several months are magically analyzed. They're then thrown in jail for buggery, while everyone else smiles and nods! Justice was served, with due process, to suppress repugnant anti-social behavior.
This debate has been framed such that believing that privacy should exist implies one is an "absolutist". Well then, I guess I absolutely believe that every individual action need not be subject to public scrutiny.
Obama himself has acted in such a way as to destroy anyone's trust in him. He promised to be on the side of 'transparency,' but as near as I can see he's no better than Bush II in this regard. He has no credibility on this issue at all.
... and it's also important to note that we in Western democracies are developing and deploying tech that is going to be used in far less liberal countries with far less rule of law. Any backdoor/escrow system that we create is also going to be made available to dictators who want to persecute and kill. If it's bad for us, it's going to be deadly to the unlucky souls who live under much less civilized regimes.
2) Politicians have to have some way of making themselves look "strong" in the eyes of U.S. Citizens. It's just steeped in our blood at this point. "The War on Terrorism" (tm) is a really easy way for them to look strong even though there's NOT a terrorism issue in the U.S.
Tech-nerds: the world doesn't operate under "theory". There are social rules that you are ignoring that completely invalidates your fears of government. Did the Snowden revelations lead to thousands of US citizen murdered by government? No? Not even one, in the realm of statistical noise? No? Why do you think that is?
The US was a country that had could have ruled over the world between 1945-1949, and yet, we chose not to do that.
Tech-nerds are going to have to reformulate their horrible anti-government rhetoric to account for these social effects.
Learn how people actually live, not how people theoretically might live.
That right there is the problem.
Government actors -people in positions of power- are known to ignore rules -social and legal- to further their own agenda. From NSA analysts listening to other people's phone sex for personal titillation, to a sitting President who orders the harassment of disfavored groups, then orders some guys to break, enter, and destroy records to cover it up, there are people in positions of power who will do Bad Things that are very much violations of applicable rules, social or otherwise.
Then and FBI lawsuit to force apple to unlock a phone the FBI could trivially unlock.
I mean why wouldn't "tech-nerds" being falling over themselves to submit and comply?
Not mentioned in this article is the cost of those we do not trust having the same keys in the locks, and the power that it would give them, simply saying that this new position is "absolutist" when in fact it is exactly the same as before.
The TSA key and the elevator key were recently leaked and no one can put that genie back in the bottle without replacing all the locks in the city/luggage.
If you design your locks with a fail-safe built in then it will only take someone with specific knowledge of that fail-safe to use it; saying we should just back down and that this is just Silicon Valley misinterpreting existing thought is a complete mischaracterization of the facts and vast new authority the government wants granted.