Suppose they meet in person to conspire. Would you suggest having every citizen carry un-blockeable microphones just in case?

This is not a "my freedom to swing my fist ends where your nose begins" kinda issue, this is "are we willing to build a police state if it reduced the risk of certain crimes by X%? Even at the cost of creating entry points into all of our communications that can be exploited by unauthorized and misauthorized actors alike..." issue. The ability to retrieve past conversations about conspiracies is a new capability here, not the ability to keep past private conversations secret (that was never as hard in pre-internet/pre-electronic times).

The interviewer in the article says:

"GREENE: But can you just explain why you would compare, you know, a company helping the government design a way to unlock an iPhone to something extreme as torture and ankle bracelets? I mean, that sounds like a very extreme jump."

But actually, an ankle bracelet that reports your location and audio might actually be less invasive of your private conversations in today's world that reporting the contents of your phone.

Not at all. I have the choice to carry / use a phone.

We have no idea what the political and technical landscapes will look like in 5, 15, or 25 years. It is not inconceivable that your governmental identification "card" will morph from the plastic of today into an embedded device in the phones of tomorrow.

People TALK about killing far more than ever seriosuly think about or have the personality to actually do. Bad humour, frustration at work or with partner, or even how to make a bomb or commit a terrorist act (oh al quaida are stupid because, it would make more sense to do x, y then z) can all be topics of conversation amongst law abiding people after a few beers.

So are we happy to move the bar to innocent until silly enough to have discussed robbing a bank? Innocent until found to have mentioned the current taboo issue? Plenty of people have found out the hard way that the TSA, Twitter and airports aren't a great mix for jokes.

I say again, there's good reasons the system sought the evidence first, not retrospective police fishing expeditions.

"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer". Sir William Blackstone 1765.

I see nothing in the new technologies to fault or change those priciples. The only thing that has changed is scale.

Everything the Obama administration has proposed includes all of the above.

For some reason, the libertarians like to ignore the fact that this would all be done under a court order.

Why should we believe them?

What's wrong with conspiring to commit crimes? Also, I would imagine that the US First Ammendment explicitly (if I understand Brandenburg v. Ohio correctly) protects such speech, as long as it doesn't result in "imminent lawless action". So it's OK to conspire to commit crimes, as long as you don't actually commit them.

Edit: Reading Wikipedia [1], it looks that mere conspiracy is not enough for a conviction, but an "act in furtherance to committing the crime" is necessary.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_%28criminal%29#Unit...

Yes, that's exactly what you do. I would much rather we let a few (more) crimes get through here and there. Weakening privacy for everyone isn't worth it.

That's just how society is.

Your choice on whether you want to live with the rest of society or not.

Just making conspiracy illegal doesn't mean you don't value privacy; it depends on what means are permissible to obtain evidence for the conspiracy.

The reality is that security is also suffering when you weaken encryption. Do you want people to be able to track your children? Do you want criminals to know when you are home? Do you want stackers reading messages of their victims? Do you want rapist to know where you and your friends go camping?

These are just things outside the problem that their is a multibillion doller industry depending on encryption in the internet.

With that kind of reasoning, you'll favor research for medicine against rare 100% lethal diseases instead of 20%-lethal cancer...

Yeah

You're going to find, that once you think it through, that you'll end up limiting the rights and freedoms of individuals... there's no getting around that.

No, because in free societies you shouldn't have absolute security.

Life sucks that way. People aren't their own little countries.

Is this where you rip on Libertarians again and talk about "your army".

From that, there is also meta studies/books that has asked what the studies has shown. To take an example, the book freakonomics pointed out that out of all the crime reducing strategies, abortion laws has shown to be one of the best method. Unwanted children tend to have higher risk of being born with low social and economic status, which is then a strong predictor for crime. None of the other strategies that were looked on had any major effect on crime rate.

Then we have surveillance. Government studies has shown CCTV is effective to reduce vehicle crimes, but no evidence is found that it prevent violent crime. One study concluded that better illumination could be a cheap way of cutting illegal activity to the same degree as CCTVs.

Surveillance in stores and bank has shown a very unexpected result. It has proven useless in preventing robberies, and shoplifters are generally not bothered by them. However, studies has shown that employees accounts for 43% loss of revenue from shoplifting and that is reduced by surveilling. Banks was also one of the early adapters who noticed this.

Then we have studies such as the last month from Harvard, which said that the available information that police investigators has when investigate crime is increasing at a very fast rate. "The trajectory of technological development points to a future abundant in unencrypted data," the study said. Comparing today with the days before encryption, and today is much easier time for a police investigator.