If the ONLY evidence of something is "encrypted information", doesn't that rule out a lot of crimes, including all physical violence?
> Even if the FBI got warrants from multiple respected judges, they couldn't go through that phone to look for clues about where kidnapper may have taken the child.
Yeah, and the same goes for when the kidnapper isn't dumb, or doesn't leave their phone behind. Sometimes it's tough. But that doesn't warrant everything.
> We don't want to endanger ourselves in order to protect the banal communications on our cell phones or dissemble our legal system for the sake of keeping our sexting private.
What you call banals is not banal to me, not at all. I would even say hundreds of millions of people having no expectation of privacy is a much bigger issue than all unsolved crimes in the US put together. And then there are past episodes like COINTELPRO, are there not. I would say that unbreakable encryption, combined with other things of course, makes a lot more impossible than just catching petty criminals via them making silly mistakes. It is also one sandbag against tyranny, and that is also a ticking bomb scenario. That bomb is far from being defused.
> If the ONLY evidence of something is "encrypted information", doesn't that rule out a lot of crimes, including all physical violence?
All but one of the examples that FBI Director James Comey gave in his speech at the Brookings Institute yesterday[1] were violent crimes (and you could argue that the drug bust was related to violent crime since he said that the group was also linked to homicides and robberies). The last example he gave showed that evidence taken from cell phones has been used to exonerate suspects as well.
> Even if the FBI got warrants from multiple respected judges, they couldn't go through that phone to look for clues about where kidnapper may have taken the child.
Yeah, and the same goes for when the kidnapper isn't dumb, or doesn't leave their phone behind. Sometimes it's tough. But that doesn't warrant everything.
> We don't want to endanger ourselves in order to protect the banal communications on our cell phones or dissemble our legal system for the sake of keeping our sexting private.
What you call banals is not banal to me, not at all. I would even say hundreds of millions of people having no expectation of privacy is a much bigger issue than all unsolved crimes in the US put together. And then there are past episodes like COINTELPRO, are there not. I would say that unbreakable encryption, combined with other things of course, makes a lot more impossible than just catching petty criminals via them making silly mistakes. It is also one sandbag against tyranny, and that is also a ticking bomb scenario. That bomb is far from being defused.