"Right" and "Wrong" are thrown out the window as soon as law enforcement makes the case that there is simply no time for the constitution. They're saving little tiny babies! but "OK, how many little tiny babies are you actually saving as opposed to blatant overreaches into the lives of private citizens" is the more effective point. The numbers will look bad, they can't help themselves once they get a whiff of some new power.

In this case, arguing for the _idea_ of liberty (incorrectly) labels you a pedant more concerned with red tape than being a hero.

Semantics, but I don't think it is necessarily the "power", so much as it is a new vector to get the evidence they feel that they need to perform their job with less effort. It is a lazy method that circumvents the laws that stand in their way for good reasons.

I am inclined to agree with you, but I have no evidence. Hence the questions. HN is well aware of the risks. But I've never seen any work done into the potential benefits. If the benefits are slim, then the discussion is moot. If there are cases that can be solved with phone data only, and if those cases are horrible or frequent enough, then there is a valid debate at hand.

This. Freedom isn't free.

"How many kids have to die before you give up your..."

"All of them you twat!"

I guess I'm doubting that. In any case, we're weighing costs and benefits in a limited context: access to a phone's data with a court order in hand. Framing an attempt to understand the benefits as "the wrong questions to ask" is counterproductive.

How can you weigh a cost against a benefit when you have no idea how big the benefit is?

One generalized answer to your question is:

"if the cost is unethical" then paying it really isn't on the table for ethical people.

So the cost of doing something unethical is infinite, assuming that you need to remain ethical, and any benefit is necessary smaller than the cost of losing your ethical status.

You might not agree that ethics are pragmatically important, but the point here is that it's possible to do a utilitarian calculus even if you don't know fully understand the possible upsides.

> Total surveillance would result in more crimes being solved

With perfect and total information how would fewer crimes be solved?

And what's really pathetic is that societies don't have discussions about unintended consequences of laws, and that prosecutors don't have checks-n-balances on their power/authority.

Fun conversation topic. A large proportion of people cannot comprehend such a concept.

If you have the same objections when using a safe, the answer to the problem has nothing to do with technology because you believer there is a fundamental flaw in the US criminal justice system. You aren't going to be able to consistently defeat the government by repeatedly trying to outpace them technologically. You have to instead change the laws that govern their actions.

If you think the rules should be different for a safe and a phone, you need to be able to explain why digital evidence should be treated differently than physical evidence?

What does either of those things have to do with decrypting things found inside either the safe or the iPhone?

If the FBI found coded papers inside a safe, they could try to decrypt those papers, but couldn't compel the owner to assist them.

Security flaws are fair game for law enforcement. Secure encryption without exploitable weaknesses will probably defeat them even in the presence of a court order.

Authourities must first gain access to premises with a warrant and then get a safe cracker in.

VS: authourities (at an airport or just about anywhere) take the phone off the person, there is a layer of obsfucation as to whether a warrant has been obtained or is needed, and data is collected.

If you look at the history of digital data (ie echelon etc) there is a clear trend for vast data hovering of all and any resources. This is not possible with physical data, as it leaves behind a more concrete trail when authorities go after it, and causes them to (generally) be more selective about what they are doing

I think a better question is what happens when we go to a paperless society? Because it's coming, and search warrants will be useless in such a society.

And while some of your rhetoric about the abuses of government spying on citizens is justified (e.g. COINTELPRO, Watergate, etc.), search warrants as a whole do far more good than harm.

And I'd hate to see this power for prosecutors disappear just because drug dealers started using iPhones to keep their illegal activities hidden from police.

Were this true, crimes would have been practically unsolvable before about the mid 1990s. Back then nobody carried pocket computers/communicators (encrypted or otherwise) and criminals also largely failed to make paper records of their crimes.

You can't smuggle guns via SMS. You can't vandalize shop windows over the Internet. You can't kill people with a digital photograph. Most crimes, and especially the violent crimes that scare people the most, require physical actions that leave physical traces.

The major exception would seem to be certain white collar crimes: insider trading, trade secret theft, perhaps tax evasion and other financial shenanigans. That's where I can see secure electronic devices making law enforcement significantly harder. But when LEOs speak against encryption in public they usually seem to invoke killers and kidnappers, as if victims' bodies were now regularly hidden inside encrypted iPhones instead of car trunks and shallow graves. Maybe LEOs believe their own rhetoric or maybe they just realize that "think of the victims of inside trading!" isn't the sort of terrifying scenario that will get the public on their side.

I could commit these crimes over the internet by using others to perform them. So the people you catch are not the prime cause of the crimes. This was not feasible before the internet, and digital monitoring would be the only way to catch me.

Perhaps law enforcement is angry at the passing of a brief golden age where most Americans carried a cell phone and that phone's security was almost always terrible. I'd put that era roughly between 2000, when American cell phone ownership rates rose past 50%, and 2009, when Apple introduced iOS full disk encryption and began regularly improving other data-at-rest protections.

> Perhaps law enforcement is angry...

I wonder if what they're truly feeling is worried. Would that change the way you thought about them?

I get that whole thing with "COINTELPRO", and Watergate where there were abuses. But assuming everyone is of the honest type here, wouldn't you want them to have more tools?

I want to see the evidence that forms the basis for their worry, if they're feeling worried. Sincere feeling is better than pretending, but sincere feeling isn't enough.

The most compelling evidence would show:

- A statistically significant decline in solving violent crimes or serious property crimes now over the 1990s.

- A statistically significant increase in solving these serious crimes among police departments with access to phone-unlocking (e.g. GrayKey devices) vs. otherwise-comparable police departments without access to such devices.

If nothing regarding smartphones shows a statistically significant correlation to serious crime solution rate, then everyone will just go with their gut feelings. The gut feeling of police is, apparently, that they need to be able to look at the contents of phones. My gut feeling is that they don't. It's an impasse.

If serious crimes are solved at a higher rate in departments with phone-unlocking capabilities, but the rate in the departments without unlocking tech is still no worse than in the 1990s, I still would resist weakening phone protections. It would make me think that maybe things have become harder since 2008, when phones were widespread and insecure, but that secure phones aren't a notable hazard to public safety.

If it turns out that departments with phone-unlocking tech are doing significantly better than departments without it, and that departments without it are now solving crimes of violence and serious property crimes at a lower rate than in the late 20th century, I'd have to have a long, hard think about my personal stance on this issue. There would still be gnarly technical issues even if I decided that less secure phones were a net benefit to society.

But I have changed my stance on security issues before. For example, I changed my mind about video surveillance of public streets. I find it more reassuring than dystopian. I'm more worried about hit-and-run drivers than about the cameras being used by a future dictatorship against the resistance. I've yet to be convinced that monitoring should extend to private spaces like my domicile or phone.

To borrow a page from your argument book, if physical evidence alone were enough, we wouldn't have so many unsolved homicides. Look at the KC unsolved murder list for 2017:

http://kcmo.gov/police/homicide-3/2017-unsolved-homicides/#....

> You can't smuggle guns via SMS.

Technically, you can send the plans for a plastic gun over the internet now, which just needs to be printed on the other side.

You can also send a virus, if the other side has a gene sequencer.

> You can't vandalize shop windows over the Internet.

You can vandalize digital signage over the internet. As well a steal credit cards from the store's credit card readers.

> You can't kill people with a digital photograph.

Well... technically it's animated gif. But yeah you can.

http://fortune.com/2017/03/22/twitter-epilepsy-gif/

> Maybe LEOs believe their own rhetoric or maybe they just realize that "think of the victims of inside trading!" isn't the sort of terrifying scenario that will get the public on their side.

Honestly, I think law enforcement believes that they need more tools. I don't think they want unsolved murders any more than the citizens do. So telling law enforcement officers, "you can pry open my iPhone from my cold dead hands" tends to ring hollow, especially if they really are of the honest kind and really do want to put criminals away as well as respecting your privacy.

The US Constitution makes it clear that the rights of the people to be secure in their persons and possessions is paramount, but for a narrowly defined list of exceptions. That crimes may go unsolved because the state is kept on too short a leash, or because modern technology has made their job more difficult, is a feature, not a bug. A government with perfect knowledge about its citizens behavior and correspondence, or one that can perfectly enforce its laws, is indistinguishable from tyranny.

>So telling law enforcement officers, "you can pry open my iPhone from my cold dead hands" tends to ring hollow, especially if they really are of the honest kind and really do want to put criminals away as well as respecting your privacy.

They can pry my iPhone from my cold dead hands, or my live warm hands will hand it over if they have a warrant, but it will remain encrypted either way, for no other reason than I have the right to do so, and they have no right to demand otherwise.

As for the rest, I can't tell if you are just trying to demonstrate that you can think creatively, or if you actually think that iOS disk encryption is an important element of a scheme to get away with murdering someone with a pathogenic virus recreated from sequence data. (Or to get away with 3D printing guns under illegal circumstances, or deliberately inducing an epileptic fit.)

Why do you insist on this artificial restriction on whether or not police officers should have access to the data on an iPhone? It seems to me this would help the clearance rate if anything. It's another tool in the arsenal.

> As for the rest, I can't tell if you are just trying to demonstrate that you can think creatively...

The internet allows new styles of crimes, perhaps crimes you or I have never really thought about yet. Or maybe I've been paying attention to crimes on the internet lately. And for the record, I'm not the first to think about resequencing viruses. See point #5 here:

https://www.vox.com/2014/5/22/5739380/why-were-never-really-...

And to answer the rest of your comment, your rhetoric reads stronger than it truly is.

Having access to more worthless data only makes it harder to find the information amongst the sea of data.

But they did use fixed-line telephones and talk in person. These communications can be monitored with a warrant for the use of a telephone intercept or listening device.