DoJ claim Apple and Google want dead children
This popped up on my other blog radar today (slow day in baby news,) and concerns most smartphone manufacturers deciding to include encryption software without backdoors (supposedly,) that allegedly gives a big FU to local police and will kill your children.
It should be noted that for several years encryption has been an option on Android, it’s just not been the default until recently. Apple’s also touting a level and method of encryption that they say can’t be defeated by anyone.
The short of it is the Department of Justice saying that the end result of encryption would probably be a dead kidnapped child because they couldn’t get into a perp’s phone.
They’re appealing to scared parents as a last ditch “please think of the children” plea to a constructed instance as opposed to “please don’t consider that if your local police department, who evidently can’t back up their important case files, can break into your phones then probably so can the rapist down the street who finds a lost one on the ground”.
The significantly much more plausible story reads “potential kidnapper who found lost phone unable to break into child’s social media to stalk, later rape and murder child/parents.”
All of this is a fun public showdown between Apple, Google, and the DoJ, but in the end it’s just a show as the NSA has Google and Apple forced to do things that the’re not allowed to admit, comment on, etc.
Apple and Google will eventually have their win, some hackers will throw a DoJ downfall party, and maybe there’ll be a story or two about a kidnapped child narrowly being saved, but the backdoors will still be there, just not for the smaller time law enforcement who would be using them mostly to bust small time drug dealers for larger offenses.
But yeah, the arguments for the government backdoor and losing the encryption are so flimsy they’re trying to create any scenario in order to let the police search anyone and anything they want without due process.
