Tech firms “can and must” put backdoors in encryption, AG Barr says

Just keep repeating “you lost all the SF-86s, but you want us to trust you with everything in everyone’s phone?”

> In deciding against Rawls, the court of appeals found that the constitutional rights against being compelled to testify against oneself were not being breached. That's because the appeals court, like the police, agreed that the presence of XXXXXXXXXX on his drives was a "foregone conclusion." The Fifth Amendment, at its most basic level, protects suspects from being forced to disclose incriminating evidence. In this instance, however, the authorities said they already know there's XXXXXXXXXX on the drives, so Rawls' constitutional rights aren't compromised.

> ""Forensic examination also disclosed that Doe [Rawls] had downloaded thousands of files known by their "hash" values to be XXXXXXXXXX. The files, however, were not on the Mac Pro, but instead had been stored on the encrypted external hard drives. Accordingly, the files themselves could not be accessed.""

A good guess can figure out what I've redacted.

In the last crypto wars in the 90s and competent scientific explanations of the dilemma between trustworthy and backdoored didn't register with people who think in political terms either.

The government side of this is rhetorically, "we can imprison and kill engineers until one of you delivers us a flying pig, whether you still say that's impossible is your call." Some engineer is going to figure out how to meet their requirements. Pigs themselves can't fly per se, but when you get to discussing how far, in what direction, for how long, under what power, and the consequences of doing nothing, even flying pigs become a solvable problem. A technologist will say, "that's horrible, unethical, and wrong, you just ran those pigs off a cliff." Everyone else looks at the politicians and the guys with the guns and says, "See? Flying pigs." They also probably push that technologist over the cliff as well.

This is why they call politics the art of the possible.

What Barr is saying is that he plans to make tech companies accountable for his problems in justice. This kind of irrational posturing is probably a bargaining gambit on other regulatory areas or just an empty signal to rank and file law enforcement that the whitehouse and AG are on their sides.

It's pretty close. For a while crypto was classified as munition and placed under very strict export control in the United States.

Encryption doesn't kill people, people do?