Apple is not the only one making this argument but as a technology leader they make the headlines. The companies resisting this move are literally a who's who of computer/software giants and innovators such as Google, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM; the list goes on and on.
Even if the feds get their "backdoor" to hardware based encryption that would not stop illicit data transmission. It would not stop proprietary software encryption or even manual encoding of messages. For literally millennia there have been cyphers and hidden text and although those are easier to break, the shear volume of traffic could allow illicit data to go undetected or un-decoded.
Add to that our national vulnerability to cyber attack. If the government believes they can create a backdoor that bad guys of any stripe cannot break they are smoking some very high grade stuff. Any backdoor is subject to being opened by cyber thieves and once it is open any semblance of data security would become vaporware. The backdoor would inevitably increase, not decrease, our vulnerability.
As to the political context there is what I believe (HOPE) is a relatively small but very noisy minority that is ruled more by fear than rational logic. Because they are so noisy many of our politicians seem happy to give in to their unrealistic and irrational demands to do something — anything to make the noisy minority feel secure in a world in a world in which they feel out of control. Politicians react by charging police agencies like the FBI with an overwhelming task that is beyond anyone's ability to achieve — absolute security. So in turn those agencies lean on technology vendors in a futile effort to make their sisyphean task easier.
I am not the first to suggest this, but IMHO we make a mistake in describing terrorism as a war. Wars are fought against nation states, have specific objectives, and can reach recognizable conclusions. Terrorism meets none of those criteria. It would be more productive to think of it in the same light as fighting crime. No one realistically thinks in terms of eliminating crime. The best we can do is tamp it down for a time and shield the vast majority of the public from crime's worst excesses.
Last edited by joemikeb; 12/22/15 05:10 PM. Reason: hit send too soon
