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.
replies(1):
Apple wants its users' secrets to be secret.
The UK wants the fact it wants Apple to reveal anyone's secrets to be secret.
Surveillance of even just one participant in these communication networks will give the police access to everything they see. And technology massively helps police in this surveillance - hidden microphones (or a laser reading vibrations off a window), cameras, and telescopic lenses and drones can reveal the contents of a screen, the password being typed, every word said out loud. The device can even be fitted with a hardware backdoor, or sabotaged, and its replacement intercepted and backdoored, as the NSA did.
But it can't be done en-masse, against every citizen.
That mere encryption makes communication immune from surveillance, or that there is anything remotely approaching the "going dark" problem, is a naked lie by the surveillance state to scare us into giving away even the tiny scraps of privacy we have left. The truth is law enforcement has far greater abilities to surveil even people trying to hide (to say nothing of the data they get from people sharing their thoughts and social networks on Facebook, or carrying phones with them that let the phone company triangulate them at any moment) than at any point in history. In light of that, we should be talking about further limiting their authority, not increasing it.
Boy, oh boy.
While I can't detail what I have seen back in 2004, if you have seen what I saw, you'd not do that comment. Even without breaking the encryption, you can collect a great deal of information.
This is why "mere metadata collection" opened the gates of hell (of a backlash) in the US.
I took that to be in reference to using "shoe leather" to conduct surveillance / investigations rather than today's ability to "simply" query a database for such information.
For example, back in the day (get off my lawn) if a crime happened in say a park in the middle of the night, then police would have to conduct door to door questioning to see who saw what and who in the area around the time, this required boots on the ground eating up man hours, something that doesn't scale up.
These days they can ask Google for a list of all the phones in the area at the time and will either have names/addresses tied to the Google accounts associated with that data or have enough data to then query the cell operators for that information.