Rather, I pointed out that they have a real mission, and they’re going to spend effort accomplishing it. But their mission isn’t to own every device — it’s to own a select few, probably on the order of hundreds or thousands a year. So, if we create a mechanism by which they can do that without owning every device, we can align our goal of protecting most devices with theirs of owning a few.
This in turn increases security for nearly everyone, because powerful agencies no longer have the same motivation to cause harm — and might be persuaded to help. After all, it’s in their interest to prevent large remote compromises — just not a higher priority than maintaining their own access.
Further, the best way to actually restrain them is through a change in government policy, which will only happen when the government believes there’s an alternative solution.
Perhaps you could try responding to the point?
Things like Room 641A show that the government doesn't even need to engage the courts to collect data on millions of people and further, that they are not limiting their collection efforts to a few hundreds or thousands of devices a year.
This is patently untrue. Snowden and much more have made it absolutely, unambiguously clear that national spy agencies do wish to gather and collect absolutely and every bit of information possible about their own law-abiding citizens as well as those here that are not.
I followed the Snowden leaks quite closely, but don’t remember anything close to unambiguously showing that.
For a big multinational like Apple, that’s probably a fair number. But it’s also harder to hide they’re doing that, and let’s us bring pressure on them politically for their political misdeeds. In the end, it’ll be major powers who can — US, Europe, China, etc.
My point is that it’s never going to be the case that technologists get to unilaterally decide that for all of society.
My proposal is just to bring phones into line with existing warrants: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19036408
But by doing so, technologists have the political cover to push back on spy agency excesses and abuses.
This helps communities to feel the reassurance of a trusted police presence, creates local jobs, and provides a decentralised alternative to having a single network controlled by a few hidden, unaccountable individuals. Putting a human conscience behind every single camera seems like a good way to prevent tyranny and encourage whistle-blowers.
