UK Effort to Keep Apple Encryption Fight Secret Is Blocked

We've fallen quite far from the tradition of policing by consent as developed by Sir Robert Peel:

- Whether the police are effective is not measured on the number of arrests, but on the lack of crime.

- An effective authority figure knows trust and accountability are paramount. Hence, "The police are the public and the public are the police."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles

Edit: another choice quote from that article, from the Home Office itself in 2012:

"The Home Office defined the legitimacy of policing, in the eyes of the public, as based upon a general consensus of support that follows from transparency about their powers, their integrity in exercising those powers and their accountability for doing so."

The problem is the people nowadays can be easily convinced that everything should be accessible, because

Ekhm

They have nothing to hide and...

Ekhm

They will be more safe

Thus the arguments about fighting terrorism and paedophilia...

I find this argument incredibly frustrating.

My view is that wide access to strong encryption carries non-obvious trade-offs, in particular with regards to organized crime. And I don't particularly mean paedophile rings, scooter gangs in London and professional burglars are organized crime too.

It's not that I have nothing to hide, therefore want the government to have unfettered access to everything. I want to ensure that properly overseen law enforcement and justice have access to normal info they need to prosecute crime, and if I have to give up a bit of privacy for it, so be it.

OK but how exactly do you propose to make that work? With current encryption technology there is no way to give up a bit of privacy: it's all or nothing. Either you have the keys or you don't. If a government has the key then it will inevitably be leaked or misused. The UK government in particular has long been heavily penetrated by Soviet / Russian intelligence.