Rather than sending a message to a president who no longer has any elections left and has less than a year in office, wouldn't it make more sense to look up your legislators[1] and write letters to them?

1/3rd of US senators and all representatives have an election coming up. They care more about voters than they do about Apple's $38 Billion[2] in liquid assets, so they need to be convinced that votes are on the side of sound security.

[1] http://openstates.org/find_your_legislator/

[2] https://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL/cash_on_hand

It could be argued that the power of lame duck presidents cuts both ways since they can act with less fear of reprisal. You may still be right about prioritizing congress.

Related, I once read an AMA on Reddit where a congressional staffer advised everyone to do their best to get op-ed pieces in newspapers which mention your elected officials, since it was their job and the job of the staffers they knew to compile such pieces for review every morning by the legislator.

here is said reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1os8rz/

Agree. How about creating "Digital Civil Liberties" rating for every politician ?

Sure, but at this point isn't it about security infrastructure? As long as we frame it as Liberty vs Security, then there will be people who disagree and the side with the stronger emotional salience will win.

The response to "if you have nothing to hide etc." Should be "What is the password to your bank account?", not a more abstract philosophical argument.

No. It does not matter that it is about. No one is going to read the fine print. You need to get the perfect slogan that appeals to the dumbest person on street. My Gramps does not give a f888 about security or encryption. He cares a lot about civil liberties.

Ask a random person on street "do you care about encryption?" v/s "Do you care about civil liberties?" and see the response.

People who want abortion rights call themselves "pro-choice" where in reality it is about denying choice to a baby.

People who want abortion ban call themselves "pro-life" where in reality they are denying woman right on her own body.

The terminology makes all the difference and growth hackers in bay area understand it far too well. When apps ask for you phone number they say "This will help to keep your account secure" but in reality the number is being used to identify you as individual.

That's actually a very awesome response! Succinct, easy to digest, and impossible to defend against, even for proponents of evil.

I don't think writing letters to senators do anything. High level elected politicians will likely have access to some kind of political consulting firm that looks at contentious districts or groups with strong get-out-to-vote organization in places that matter. Letters aren't going to fool a political consulting firm into thinking the needle of district opinion has moved somewhere.

Perhaps the software workers of America should consider organizing a professional association, just like the AMA? It would have all sorts of benefits beyond organizing political action.

Informing your representatives of issues you care about definitely makes a difference. They have jobs because people vote for them. If a vocal group feels strongly about one issue, and they campaign for that, the representative needs to pay attention or they risk losing their job.

Don't assume that someone else will represent you via a petition. Calling or writing yourself is much more powerful.

I believe you have under-clashed with argument, as if I didn't respond head-on to that point already.

(1) If your district isn't contentious, that means the sum of factors aren't of sufficient effect size to care about that specific district. With limited funds, you concentrate elsewhere.

(2) Just because there's noise doesn't mean that people's opinions have changed. You're assuming that people's opinions have not already been modeled. Some elected official may suddenly get a flood of emails about gun rights in proximity to some highly publicized event on gun laws. That does not mean that the distribution or magnitude of opinions have substantively changed.

(3) Some groups do have negotiating power because they're aware of the political calculus more intimately than the average noise-making group like Black Lives Matter. They're able to distribute distilled information to their members and organize effective get-out-to-vote drives in the districts that matter (meaning they also do not wantonly spend their finite resources).

If you don't organize, then you are noise. Organizing is more important than voting (or writing a letter) itself, because part of organizing is dealing with finite resources through the skillful attending to the places that matter, and skillful neglect of the places that don't matter, implying that you can actually deliver on a get-out-to-vote drive when the time (and places) matters.

Hmm. First off, you do not really know if senators read letters or pay attention to phone calls or blog posts or not.

Second, my feeling is if someone sits down to think about an issue, writes a letter and stamps their name on it, then they probably become more informed and involved in discussion than another guy who just ticks a box on a petition. This informed person can go on to discuss the issue with friends or form his/her own local group. So, writing letters to senators is useful, even if it is just a first step or means to an end.

Nobody needs to change their opinion as a result of my letter. I wouldn't respect them if they did so without consideration. So (2) is irrelevant.

I didn't intend to clash with you, I'm just stating my opinion which is a bit different than yours. It's perfectly fine if you want to say writing letters is useless. I feel differently.

If you sit back and assume your district is already modeled, etc etc, then you are not participating in democracy and you have not seen for yourself who else out there might agree with you. The most important things about democracy are your vote and your voice. One without the other holds much less strength.

The ACM exists, but it'd be nice if it collaborated with the EFF more often for causes that impact the industry such as this.

I can't find anything about actions the ACM has taken on this issue. According to their website [1], the USACM is responsible for US policy matters.

The USACM website [2] does not mention anything about the ongoing DOJ vs. Apple case, or upcoming encryption laws being drafted by Burr-Feinstein.

Their "Tech Policy Blog" is currently down ("Access forbidden!") [3]

Most of the discussion I see about policy has to do about diversifying computer science and getting more women involved. This is laudable, but given recent news you'd think they would have some comment on their website about the DOJ, Apple, or encryption in general.

The EFF, on the other hand, has kept us well informed about proposed laws and the Apple FBI case.

[1] http://www.acm.org/about/history

[2] http://usacm.acm.org/

[3] http://techpolicy.acm.org/blog/

Why not both? From Josh Earnest's comments last Friday, it seems the President and he still do not understand that no law can keep encryption out of the hands of criminals [1]

This needs to be understood by the President and the DOJ. Maintaining public security is an important, difficult job. We cannot rely on our family and friends to keep us safe, and our society and unity depends largely on law enforcement.

[1] https://youtu.be/LRR2B5f82e0?t=38m25s

Has there been a more recent poll than this one from April 2015 [1] showing public support for intelligence-community (and greater mass policing) reform?

[1] https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/priv...

There have been a few polls about the specific iPhone issue [1] [2]. (All tend to be worded imperfectly and public opinion swings depending on how it is worded, suggesting the more the public is informed on the issue, the more they side with Apple's stance.)

I tend to think that "public support for reform of mass policing" is too vague to get a real public opinion on. Everyone has different ideas on what needs to be reformed. By asking this questions you make citizens feel involved, but you don't get a real public discussion unless you are talking about something specific like putting back doors into phones. This was part of the problem with the Snowden revelations, in my opinion. There were so many that we had trouble attacking more than a few at a time. The larger issue of course is that the FISA court makes it impossible for the government to sufficiently comment on any of that.

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160224/18124533706/way-y...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/03/18/technology/doc...

Many of the senators have de facto lifetime terms. One can argue that writing to them makes even less sense.

Tweets, schmeets. He can ignore 'em all the doo-dah day. Send him a letter.

After you do that you can also leave a message at White House comment line, 202-456-1111.

I don't encrypt because I have something to hide. I encrypt because I don't want anyone to tell me I can't hide anything.

Me too. Also, I have terribly embarrassing secrets.

The EFF is fighting the fight we all should be fighting.

In my opinion their letters are too forceful and not understanding of how difficult it is to enforce the law and bring justice to victims. For example, they write

> We call on the Obama Administration to heed the advice of neutral security experts, engineers, and even his own advisors who have affirmed the dangers inherent in the order issued to Apple

There's no need for Obama to change his mind here simply because experts say so. In fact, if properly explained, he could understand himself that software is ungovernable. Encryption technology is just words on paper.

Print out an encryption program and send it to your representatives. Let them see how anyone can create it for free. Let's educate our representatives. Enough with this idea that they need to be beaten over the head with a stick. They believe they are doing the job protecting public safety and the constitution. Once you give them that benefit of the doubt, then we will be able to move forward.

He doesn't need to "govern" all of software. He just wants to control the dominant platforms, so some percentage of law enforcement efforts can get a little traction there. The fact that a percentage of criminals will use encryption anyway is unavoidable they're not trying to stop that.

He has not said that, nor has any representative or DOJ official.

By the way, the next meeting of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) is on Friday, March 25, and will be shown live here [1]

You can submit questions to them at [email protected] . This might be another good place to direction questions about the President's understanding of encryption technology.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/pcast

Ask HN: A very genuine question.

How do you propose we keep an eye on those who mean to physically harm others? How would you solve this?

Terrorism kills fewer people than almost every hazard Americans face. Cancer, auto accidents, drug resistant bacteria, and hundreds of other risks are how 99.5% of Americans will die. So, for the minuscule risk that terrorism presents we've spent billions, give up privacy and consider ever more extreme measures?

How about instead we instead acknowledge the risks are small to Americans, and refocus our attention, our lethal attention, to the clerics, organizations, bankers and states that sponsor terrorism.

Let's talk giving up civil liberties after we have run out of accountable parties to bring to justice.

Sometimes there's just not a good answer to problems. The rhetoric on the anti-encryption side is "We need to be able to break encryption because if we can't then bad guys will do bad things with it". This is true. There is no way to make it so only good people can do only good things with it. It's either secure/unbreakable or it is not. There's no middle ground that won't lead to it being worthless.

Maybe there is no solution to this problem. I have yet to be convinced that surveillance has been effective at all at combatting terrorism, and even if it's been occasionally effective its ROI is terrible.

Our various societies are generally willing to accept certain tradeoffs because there are no black and white answers. In the US, society as a whole is currently willing to accept a relatively enormous amount of collateral damage to allow widespread gun ownership. This causes multiple orders of magnitude more deaths than terrorism, and yet for now, it's deemed acceptable to protect certain liberties.

If encryption is allowed to be truly secure, it's possible that more people will die in terrorist attacks. It's also possible that more people will get away with truly terrible things like child pornography. But the freedoms that we give away generally never come back, or they take an enormous amount of time to come back. For me, maintaining those liberties is worth the tradeoff.

Maybe there is a way.... Let’s say every person gets a public and private key. Private key is only known to the individual. The only exception: your private key is immediately encrypted with public keys of large number of random strangers (10K?) and in its encrypted form sent to some government registry.

You encrypt all of your content with your own public key and have reasonable expectation of privacy as long as at least one of those 10K people feels you deserve your privacy.

If you happened to be a terrorist and the consensus of 10K strangers who encrypted your private key is to let the government snoop on you, they can choose to decrypt your private key and turn it over to the government.

Well for one thing we could open up all the secret courts that these people use to do what they do with no accountability.

Oh wait, were you talking about "terrorists", or government agents? It's not clear.

I'd need enough cash to hire Tom Cruise and at least three half-dozen rotating shift blue goo tub people. In fact, I'm pretty sure you can write a $100,000,000 check payable to the Church of Scientology, and they'll supply the whole package.

The truth is, in a free society, it is not a problem that cannot be completely solved. As long as people want to harm others, they will find a way.

This is a great question, but it's not HN's job to answer, it is the DOJ's.

We really need to get the point across that no government would be able to enforce a law that requires a certain software design (in this case, back doors) in all commercial and free software.

It's the equivalent of requiring people to say or write only certain things. Even China and North Korea do not do that successfully, and they try really really hard.

Our representatives and law enforcement are woefully uninformed about this issue, and it hurts the public because fingers are being pointed in the wrong direction. While we are infighting, terrorists are making strides.

How many of them has he read, though? And, how many of them does he need to read / receive to change his administration's posturing on this?

(My guess: 0 and ∞)

Its interesting that such a vocal West Coast crowd votes for Obama, when in fact he has been one of the worst presidents in recent history on use of privacy and security.

Im curious to know why people still follow a person with such a horrible record on the constitution, when he studied in great detail.

With Obama's recent actions regarding privacy and encryption, I'm terribly glad I didn't go to work for the US Digital Service.

It's not like the President understands that encryption is ungovernable and is pursuing a fruitless path on purpose. He just doesn't get it.

We should be begging smart people to get in the White House and help relate the facts to him. The current CTO Megan Smith is there calling for more people to join. She says the discussion about encryption is "ongoing". She's obviously outnumbered. Tech does not have proper representation in the White House.

Stop giving the president just another excuse to give him another out.

He has plenty of smart people around him, yet he still insists on government over privacy.

It's not an excuse, he's a lousy guy for not giving tech staff his sincere attention. My point is, nobody has broken through to him yet. It's his fault, but that doesn't mean we should stop trying. We all bear the results of what he says publicly.

No great mystery really: voters choose among the options they have.

There are very few pro-privacy US politicians (such as Rand Paul), and they are most certainly not on the presidential ticket.

Do you honestly think he's going to read any of them? I can't imagine him scrolling through his notifications feed, but hey, who knows what he does when he's sitting on the toilet :P

Doubtful he has that kind of time but he has staff who will. And if he has any integrity, he will at least take people's concerns into consideration.

> Doubtful he has that kind of time but he has staff who will. And if he has any integrity, he will at least take people's concerns into consideration.

If he's not reading them himself (I agree with you that he probably isn't) he likely only hears what his staffers tell him, so he might not even be aware of some people's concerns.

3001!