[Cryptography] Govt Can't Let Smartphones Be 'Black Boxes, ' Obama Say

[Ray Dillinger]

On 03/11/2016 09:20 PM, Henry Baker wrote:
> FYI -- So much for a "balanced" view...
> 
> http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-03-11/obama-confronts-a-skeptical-silicon-valley-at-south-by-southwest
> 
> Government Can't Let Smartphones Be 'Black Boxes,' Obama Says
> 
> Justin Sink
> 
> March 11, 2016 -- 5:00 AM EST
> 
> Updated on March 11, 2016 -- 5:24 PM EST
> 
> President Barack Obama said Friday that smartphones -- like the iPhone the FBI is trying to force Apple Inc. to help it hack -- can't be allowed to be "black boxes," inaccessible to the government.  The technology industry, he said, should work with the government instead of leaving the issue to Congress.
> 
> "You cannot take an absolutist view on this," Obama said at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.  "If your argument is strong encryption no matter what, and we can and should create black boxes, that I think does not strike the kind of balance we have lived with for 200, 300 years, and it's fetishizing our phones above every other value."

It would be a damned sight easier to take a view that allowed
exceptional access with warrants, etc, if in the past the USG
had abided by the notion that such access is in fact exceptional
rather than routine, and needs to be provided for with warrants,
etc.

When the precedent has been set that you're in the business of
hoovering up absolutely everything regardless of privacy or
invasiveness, that you're in the business of leaving security
holes open for our enemies to exploit, and that you have no
respect whatsoever for the right of people to be secure in their
persons and papers from unreasonable search and ...

Seriously, how can anybody trust the USG when now it's saying
that we're wrong to defend ourselves from the kind of exploits
that it's been in the forefront of creating and abusing?  Which
its enemies have repeatedly used against us as well?

Show us any reason to think that this is to be reserved for
individual instances with publicly acknowledged search warrants
subject to due process, or any reason to think that any hole
left for the USG would not also be exploited by Russia, China,
and North Korea, and I'd consider it.

					Bear

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