There’s a really big problem with a statist response to terrorism or crime.
What happens if terrorists or criminals infiltrate the State? In that case, a statist response will deliver us to our enemies even faster.
We should consider why we didn’t become totalitarian during Cold War I. One reason was that early on Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy emphasized the possibility of infiltration. (There was the minor problem that Nixon was corrupt and McCarthy was a wannabee dictator but they didn’t do much permanent damage.) Maybe we need someone pointing out the same possibility today.
Repeat after me: “I have a list of 205 Iranian agents in the State Department…”
But, to do this legitimately, they would also need evidence that the user had the keys to give to them. A person cannot legally be compelled to give information to The State which they themselves do not have to give. Ignoring all of this would make their harassment of people appear suspiciously discretionary, as to say, convenient.
James Comey is the director of the FBI an organization that for decades denied the existence of organized crime in the U.S. That he believes in some magic formula to defeat crypto systems is simply continuing a proud tradition of willfull ignorance.I personally am proud to see that the Obama administration is maintaining a long history of employing only the bestest and the brightest.
Empirically speaking, you can get away with a great deal of discretionary harassment; just so long as you know how to allocate it to unsympathetic targets. And even Sheriff Podunk develops that skill reasonably quickly.
As for evidence that the person had the key, I suspect that(barring some rather unusual situation) nobody would bat an eye at the assertion that somebody who either sent an encrypted message or is storing one or more encrypted files either had the key or is serving as an intermediary for somebody who did. They probably wouldn’t be able to get away with shaking down just anyone whose messages they can’t read; but they also won’t need to. This step will be reserved for people whose case looks unsavory in some other way; and charges related to not disclosing the keys will just be another item on the stack for obtaining a plea bargain(since well over 90% of cases that aren’t dropped end up in a plea; what you can prove is somewhat less important than the severity of what the target risks if they refuse the deal and go to trial).
