{"id":9929,"date":"2021-08-24T12:51:20","date_gmt":"2021-08-24T16:51:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=9929"},"modified":"2021-08-24T12:51:20","modified_gmt":"2021-08-24T16:51:20","slug":"why-the-government-should-not-be-trusted-with-a-backdoor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=9929","title":{"rendered":"Why The Government Should Not Be Trusted With A Backdoor"},"content":{"rendered":"

As you all know, Apple is building spyware into iOS 15. This is ostensibly in service of fighting child pornography but will, you can be sure, be expanded to detect other illegal activities and finally wrong think™<\/sup>. Apple, of course, ensures us this won\u2019t happen but, really, they won\u2019t have any choice.<\/p>\n

Governments have long been demanding a backdoor into Apple\u2019s encryption, and the US even got a court order in 2016 demanding that Apple build one. Back then, Apple (successfully) argued that no such capability existed and that building one was a significant and costly undertaking with long term maintenance and support obligations. Now, of course, the machinery is already in place and it\u2019s hard to see what arguments Apple could bring to bear against such a court order: certainly not that they\u2019re committed to protecting their users\u2019 privacy.<\/p>\n

Apple aside, this brings up another, related issue: Can the government\u2014any government\u2014be trusted with such a backdoor? One needn\u2019t descend into paranoid musings about rogue agents selling secret keys to malefactors. We can, instead, depend on Hanlon\u2019s Razor<\/a>. To wit: the government exposed its watchlist to an unprotected server on the internet<\/a>. If this was the only example of such fecklessness we could shake our heads bemusedly and assure ourselves that those responsible would be put in charge of cleaning the bathrooms in the North Dakota FBI field office. But of course this sort of thing happens all the time and nothing at all will happen to those responsible for the disclosure.<\/p>\n

What reason is there to suppose that these clowns would do any better in protecting a backdoor key? State and criminal actors would be working full time to get access and wouldn\u2019t depend on someone leaving it exposed on an unprotected server. Sooner or later someone would be careless and the secret would be out. If the key were obtained by criminal elements, our smart phones would instantly become useless for banking or any other type of sensitive activities. If the FBI or any other government agency wants to hold a master key to our phones, they better have shown themselves capable of safeguarding that key. They better have shown themselves worthy of our trust. Sadly, they\u2019ve shown just the opposite.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As you all know, Apple is building spyware into iOS 15. This is ostensibly in service of fighting child pornography but will, you can be sure, be expanded to detect other illegal activities and finally wrong think™. Apple, of course, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[62],"class_list":["post-9929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-privacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9929"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9930,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9929\/revisions\/9930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}