Five Eyes and Japan call for Facebook backdoor to monitor crime

Example: Donald Knuth doesn't use email. This works fine for him because of his reputation, but if I were to quit email and social networks, I'm not influential enough that people would send me snail mail.

backdoors can be used by bad actors too.

As this subject has been iterated over many times, will keep this comment short.

* FB deploying frictionless, unbreakable encryption at scale makes the job of law enforcement harder, and makes it easier for less sophisticated criminals to get away with conspiracies (a word which, by the way, simply refers to two or more people secretly collaborating on criminal activity).

* As math cannot be stopped, more sophisticated criminals, as well as those with general concerns about privacy from big brother can still use their own open source tools.

Long before the internet, comms via telephony were anything but secure. We’ve tested the waters post-Snowden with E2EE which likely resulted in numerous secret case studies on the effect E2EE has on an orderly society.

* Don’t bring gizmos into your home if you want a modicum of privacy at home

* FB offering a frictionless, global private network out of reach of law enforcement isn’t a constitutional right. We can still gather in a home, use strong encryption when it matters (in more extreme cases, on an offline device, with write-only outgoing media transported via sneaker net to the transmission device).

* I’d rather have hardened devices and lawful access to the deployed encryption by major service providers, rather than flawed by design consumer device architecture. Then I can employ strong encryption software on those devices and have more confidence in preventing big brother from snooping at all.

With this kind of architecture, law enforcement doesn't need 0-days, they only need a warrant/NSL, or to just ask the manufacturer nicely. Some manufacturers (e.g. Amazon/Ring) are a little too eager to essentially hand all of their data over to the police in real-time with almost no strings attached.

Devices that don't already upload everything to the cloud (e.g. Apple and Google's pinky-promise that smart assistant audio is processed locally) automatically receive and apply software and firmware updates from the manufacturer / carrier that can arbitrarily change device behavior. The government can and probably does compel these companies to write and push custom firmware to targeted devices.

"We encrypt your data so hard that we couldn't access it even if we wanted to" is almost always a lie, is never verifiable, and is ultimately subject to the same automatic firmware/software update problem.

It will never be possible to secure systems like these from government snooping, and people largely don't seem to care.