Less than a week after the attacks in Paris — while the public and policymakers were still reeling, and the investigation had barely gotten off the ground — Cy Vance, Manhattan’s District Attorney, released a policy paper calling for legislation requiring companies to provide the government with backdoor access to their smartphones and other mobile devices. This is the first concrete proposal of this type since September 2014, when FBI Director James Comey reignited the “Crypto Wars” in response to Apple’s and Google’s decisions to use default encryption on their smartphones. Though Comey seized on Apple’s and Google’s decisions to encrypt their devices by default, his concerns are primarily related to end-to-end encryption, which protects communications that are in transit. Vance’s proposal, on the other hand, is only concerned with device encryption, which protects data stored on phones.
It is still unclear whether encryption played any role in the Paris attacks, though we do know that the attackers were using unencrypted SMS text messages on the night of the attack, and that some of them were even known to intelligence agencies and had previously been under surveillance. But regardless of whether encryption was used at some point during the planning of the attacks, as I lay out below, prohibiting companies from selling encrypted devices would not prevent criminals or terrorists from being able to access unbreakable encryption.
Vance’s primary complaint is that Apple’s and Google’s decisions to provide their customers with more secure devices through encryption interferes with criminal investigations. He claims encryption prevents law enforcement from accessing stored data like iMessages, photos and videos, Internet search histories, and third party app data. He makes several arguments to justify his proposal to build backdoors into encrypted smartphones, but none of them hold water.
Gary Edwards on 19 Sep 12Byron Deeter is right, but perhaps he's holding back on his reasoning. Silicon Valley is all about platform, and platform plays only come about once every ten to twenty years. They come like great waves of change, not replacing the previous waves as much as taking away and running with the future. Cloud Computing is the fourth great wave. It will replace the PC and Network Computing waves as the future. It is the target of all developers and entrepreneurs. The four great waves are mainframe, workstation, pc and networked pc, and the Internet. Cloud Computing takes the Internet to such a high level of functionality that it will now replace the pc-netwroking wave. It's going to be enormous. Especially as enterprises move their business productivity and data / content apps from the desktop/workgroup to the Cloud. Enormous. The key was the perfect storm of 2008, where mobility (iPhone) converged with the standardization of tagged PDF, which converged with the Cloud Computing application and data model, which all happened at the time of the great financial collapse. The financial collapase of 2008 caused a tectonic shift in productivity. Survival meant doing more with less. Particularly less labor since cost of labor was and continues to be a great uncertainty. But that's also the definition of productivity and automation. To survive, companies were compelled to reduce labor and invest in software/hardware systems based productivity. The great leap to a new platform had it's fuel; survival. Social applications and services are just the simplest manifestation of productivity through managed connectivity in the Cloud. Wait until this new breed of productivity reaches business apps! The platform wars have begun, and it's for all the marbles. One last thought. The Internet was always going to win as the next computing platform wave. It's the first time communications have been combined and integrated into content, and vast dat
