FBI Doesn’t Have A Moral Leg To Stand On Criticizing Google, Apple Over Phone Encryption

The FBI keeps hammering at Google and Apple, saying that encrypting cellphones by default helps all kinds of criminals. Frankly, this is disgusting. Of the FBI, that is. They don’t have a single moral leg to stand on. Imagine if building constructors had started keeping the master key to all buildings they constructed, all private residences, even after those residences had been sold and somebody had moved in there. The builders wouldn’t do this out of spite or malice, but just as a result of not really thinking about what they were doing. Imagine if things sort of just developed that way in the building industry, without anybody reflecting much on it. Then, law enforcement discovers that there are master keys to homes somewhere they can just go and get them, so they go to these contractors to demand the keys to random private residences under threat of force. At that point, law enforcement would be able to walk in and out of people’s private homes without a warrant, just because the contractors conveniently kept a master key. You can see that happening, can’t you? Just like law enforcement has gone into hospitals and fetched blood samples from suspects for DNA matching. (Yes, they have.) At this point, the contractors would realize that saving the master key to sold private residences wasn’t a very good idea, and decide to stop doing anything of the sort. This is where Google and Apple are with respect to mobile phones today. So the FBI’s furious strawman objections at Google and Apple basically boil down to “If you don’t keep that master key to the super-private devices you sell, we can’t force you to help us with walking straight into those super-private devices at our leisure and read whatever we like.” Yes, that objection is true. But it’s not an undesired side effect. It’s the whole damn point in the first place. It doesn’t matter if encryption of your private data “helps kidnappers”, which the FBI desperately claims. It’s doubtful, but it’s also completely irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if it helps whomever horrible. Law enforcement just doesn’t get a master key to your house to walk in at their leisure, period. They need a search warrant. And even with a warrant, you’re under no obligation whatsoever to open the door for them; they have a legal right to try to break down your door, but absolutely no fictive right to succeed in breaking in. If they can’t bust down the door (or open a safe), even when it’s legal to do so, tough luck. That’s not your problem, nor should it be. The FBI’s objections are deeply immoral, and they should not just be called out on it, but called out for how disgustingly they are behaving. They need to be publicly and visibly torn down from their imaginary high horse. Privacy remains your own responsibility.