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

[Yui Hirasawa]

> Siding with Apple are technology companies including Amazon Inc.,
> Microsoft Corp., Facebook Inc. and Google's parent Alphabet Inc.  On
> Thursday, the government filed a memorandum in the case arguing that
> Apple would need to assign as few as six workers for as little as two
> weeks to hack into Syed Farook's phone.

These companies are siding with Apple for PR. This is also the first
time I see anyone actually call Google Alphabet.

> Apple and other tech firms have said that building backdoors into
> their encrypted products could put them at a disadvantage to foreign
> competitors.

This is what annoys me about this Apple vs. FBI thing. It has made
backdoor a buzzword that technologically illiterate keep repeating as if
it was of any relevance to the case.

> "If in fact you can't crack that at all, government can't get in, then
> everybody's walking around with a Swiss bank account in their pocket."

Currently only best of the criminals have this possibility. Giving it to
the general public won't make any negative difference.

> "I suspect the answer is going to come down to, how do we create a
> system that, encryption is as strong as possible, the key is secure as
> possible, and it is accessible by the smallest number of people
> possible for the subset of issues that we agree is important," he
> said.

Unfortunately the US govt is not very small.

> After fixing HealthCare.gov with the assistance of private-sector
> technology experts, "what we realized was we could potentially build a
> SWAT team, a world class tech office inside of the government, that
> was helping across agencies," Obama said.  That became the U.S.
> Digital Service.  ----------

Why aren't they helping now?