Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We need people advocating for the right balance, not just getting each other frustrated. I don't understand this line of thinking regarding the big encryption debate. Yeah it sounds good if you don't know anything about encryption. "Look, he's being reasonable. Why is everyone saying he's wrong instead of striking a balance". The problem is it's a binary problem. There is zero way to strike any type of balance here…
I didn't think I'd come back but I liked your comment and wanted to rebut. There is a middle ground and where it lies is directly related to the assessed risk. To support a mechanism is a binary choice but its design is not. In the San Bernardino example, an unexpected potential adversary (Apple) has emerged. An unexpected vector is being discussed which has nothing to do with the encryption mechanism itself. Perfect…
Did you know encryption technology is not limited to Apple? It's not even limited to big companies. Anyone with a book or internet connection can implement encryption.
This isn't plutonium, which is hard to come by. Any law that puts a backdoor on phone's encryption schemes will fail to stop criminals from hiding their communications. They'll simply use another device or download a different app that does give them encrypted communications.
You and Obama are both correct to point out we should be seeking a balance to maintain our security. However, your calculation of that balance is missing some key elements, such as the one I mention above, which is that this is a gigantic game of whack-a-mole. It's the biggest one you could ever play. There's no way you can censor the internet or ban certain kinds of software. It's the same as censoring speech. Encryption is just code. The policy Obama is implicitly proposing simply won't work.
I can see you've thought about this so I'll give you one example where I think we should unlock a phone.
In the movie-like scenario where there's a nuclear weapon hidden somewhere, and an encrypted phone holds its location, then I would expect the NSA and FBI and every computer in the world to sick their processors on copies of that phone's data in an attempt to break the encryption. I believe this is already described as something the NSA has in place with a program called Bullrun. It seems likely to me that the FBI is unable to make use of this technology because decryption is so laborious, even for the mass of computers that the NSA has built up, and even for all of Google's machines. They just don't have enough to decrypt every criminal's phone. But I believe they could decrypt the movie-like scenario nuclear-weapons-hiding phone.
So we're covered in the most extreme case. But in reality there are all kinds of ways to discover someone's password, and you don't always need a huge server farm to get at it. For example, software has weaknesses that are only known to the NSA. No software is 100% impregnable. Even Snowden admits this.
We've existed as a society for a long time without encryption. Bad actors who collaborate exclusively online using encrypted technology, and who never meet in person, are few and far between.
Unless the US government has some major secrets to reveal about the balancing factors of maintaining public security, then on balance, trying to force backdoors into phones will make us all less secure. This forced weakness will be exploitable by every hacker in the world, at no cost, and from positions which are not governable. And the phone manufacturer will be required to keep that weakness as-is because to fix it would be to break the law.