UK Effort to Keep Apple Encryption Fight Secret Is Blocked

Users want their secrets to be secret.

Apple wants its users' secrets to be secret.

The UK wants the fact it wants Apple to reveal anyone's secrets to be secret.

There must be a healthy middle ground between mass untouchable criminal communication networks on the one hand, and full panopticon 24x7 for every civilian on the other. Or I don't know, maybe there isn't. But at least the debate should be public.

The problem is that in the past you could rely on laws protecting privacy. You send a letter to someone, and it was illegal to open it. You couldn't eavesdrop on a phone call without breaking the law.

You could thus have a judicial system allowing the invasion of that privacy.

Reasonable people don't have a problem with the court system issuing say 200 wiretaps a year when provided with appropriate levels of evidence on a specific person. People don't have a problem with searching reasonable suspects either.

Even when you ignored the law you couldn't do it at scale. The CIA might plant an illegal wiretap, but that will cost them significant resources, they can't do it to a thousand people for a year, let alone indefinitely to a billion people.

Thus it was limited. The police have always been able to assign 50 people in performing a tail on a suspect. That doesn't scale.

Today though you can scale up. If you spoke on a phone, 99.999% of the time nobody will have heard it, despite it being in the clear, you can track people by following their phone signals. Everyone is tracked all the time, and you just need the warrant to pull the tracking detail - including data from before the warrant.

The next step is using that data and feeding it into AI. Currently the bottleneck is analysis - you can track a billion people. but you can only look at 1,000 of them. Feed that into an AI engine and you can analyse everyone.

With wiretapping, today if you send something without end-to-end encryption, your message is read, possibly modified, by trillion dollar companies designed to extract value from your message, so you need end-to-end encryption.

The problem society has is that judges can't then authorise wiretapping, which society agreed was a reasonable action 30 years ago, and 300 years ago. Even in the US with the optional constitutional amendments, allows for

> Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized

End to end encryption removes this possibility, there's no middle ground, because you either have

* fully encrpyted and thus immune to warrants

* encryption with backdoor and thus leakable and thus used against you (by corporations or foreign security agencies)

The problem is the scale that modern technology allows, and that means we need new understandings on what's possible. But public debate doesn't do that, it's still routed in the "nothing to hide".