No, I couldn't. The operative word there is not "shoot", it's "warrant." The fourth amendment explicitly makes an exception for warrants. If the government has a warrant then I am legally bound to hand over my keys. If I don't, they can put me in prison for that.

I have no idea how you could possibly reach this conclusion. My initial comment did not contain the word "warrant".

By "government overreach" I mostly meant spying on me without a warrant, e.g. the activities brought to light by Edward Snowden, and the common practice of seizing devices at the border.

From you original comment:

>The fourth amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees that the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and the ninth amendment to the Constitution guarantees that the people retain un-enumerated rights. I, as a citizen of the United States, maintain that one of those unenumerated rights is my right to employ technological defenses against government overreach.

I read two ways to interpret that:

- "Government overreach" is to include even searches authorized by a warrant in which case you are defending unrestricted use of encryption.

- "Government overreach" is to only include warrantless searches in which cause you are only defending using encryption in a manner in which a warrant can break the encryption.

Considering the second option is basically the government's position and the rest of your post seemed anti-government, I thought you were advocating for the first interpretation.

The second option is the government's ostensible position. But you seem to have forgotten the central point of my argument which is that the government is not trustworthy. Just because the government says that it will only use its decryption keys when it has a warrant, history shows that the government cannot be trusted to keep its word on matters like this. The government does end-runs around Constitutional rights regularly. Therefore, the power to enforce the Constitution's constraints on government action cannot be entrusted to the government. It must remain with the people.

>The problem with this line of argument is that it is a general argument against government and not specific to this issue.

If your argument is that you can't trust the government, you can't trust the government regardless of whether they have a warrant or whether they are operating in the digital or physical world.

If they have a warrant, what exactly is it that you think I need to trust them about at that point?

Cryptographic back doors are totally different. It is not possible to build a back door that has auditability built into its basic physics the way warrants do. That the thing that William Barr doesn't understand. His mindset is something like, "If we can send a man to the moon, surely we can make a way for law enforcement to break encryption that doesn't threaten people's rights." Well, no, we can't. Sending a man to the moon is merely difficult. A back door that only "the good guys" can use is actually impossible.

This entire write up stinks and I don't trust the government to implement this overreach in any sort of way which benefits the average American citizen. :(