A Few Thoughts on Ray Ozzie’s “Clear” Proposal

The idea is that each of the secret keys (not nonces) would be kept on paper in a well observed location, with only the public keys leaving. The building would be operated by whoever is responsible for generating the keys and showing that their keys aren't (hopefully yet) compromised. They could allow the public to observe and perhaps the boxes could be marked with the range of IMEIs/keys contained within. If the cops want to go in and get a key out of a box, they can get a warrant to do it but everyone can know which few hundred thousand phones have been compromised.

It doesn't completely prevent malfeasance... it just makes it a PITA.

> This is the hard question, I argue the group should not give her the right to censor this image.

Sacrificing people's dignity for the supposed common good it very much not a road I am willing to go down. If we are willing to sacrifice an individual's dignity, there is nothing left worth sacrificing it for.

Mind you that this is distinct from limited use for the purposes of prosecution.

> Imagine she had the power to censor that image, then she might be bribed into censoring it.

Yeah, and then imagine I could strip you of your human rights because I value a common good higher than your human rights. Also, no matter what the law, you cannot completely prevent that people will try to put pressure on other people. The solution is not to disregard the individual's dignity, but to create incentives that counter attempts to silence those who suffer. Create an environment where people will come to the conclusion that allowing their picture to be used is the thing they should do, all things considered.

As for your idea of "democratized mass surveillance", I guess it's a nice thought experiment, but not something that could realistically be implemented in a way that would actually be fundamentally better than what we have today. For one, the checks and balances we have today are a sort-of implementation of the same fundamental idea of decentralizing power, but also, total democratization is not a guarantee for humanistic outcomes: Witch hunts, oppression of minorities, and genocides are in a way highly democratic. The problem with the oppression of homosexuals, say, was not that the abuses were a secret, but that the majority opinion was that it was the right thing to do, and such mass surveillance would only have helped with it.

Bricking the phone works against law enforcement by only allowing raw access to the data. Even if Clear worked correctly, law enforcement couldn't open apps and see the data in the correct context. They'd have raw data files full of indexes, hashes, and cached data. Worse, apps would start to encrypt data on the client specifically to avoid Clear.

The only significant change between plain key escrow and Clear (bricking the phone) would defeat the usefulness of Clear.

Nah, that's just another effect of the same underlying cause:

Sexuality is something that religions have very restrictive rules about, and anything that doesn't fit within the bounds of those rules is considered immoral. Which is why homosexuals were and still are oppressed, and which is also why pedophiles are oppressed essentially just like homosexuals once were. Being a pedophile is widely considered to be a moral failing, just like homosexuality once was (and by some still is). This taboo leads to people not rationally looking at the actual facts of the situation, not considering the actual consequences of what is happening, instead anything that is in any way associated with pedophilia is seen as equally objectionable, which in turn leads to a general lack of distinction.

"Child porn" is just a generic label for "terrible immoral stuff done by immoral people involving the idea of sexual practices involving children" in the public discourse, and a terrible label at that, given that it either tries to use a negative view of pornography to evoke an emotional reaction to an essentially unrelated topic, or trivializes the experience of abuse victims whose agony is documented by suggesting that it's in some way similar to consenting adults producing erotic works for the pleasure of other consenting adults to look at. It's a bit like using the label "child horror movies" for snuff videos depicting children.

Just a nitpick. Matthew Green uses the analogy of signing keys being leaked often as evidence that Ozzi’s proposed system would be similarly not secure. This is a weak analogy: signing private keys are often leaked because their use case requires them to be “online” in some fashion (code must be signed with the private key so it can be verified with the public key). Similarly, CAs must use private keys operationally (to sign customer CSRs), increasing the risk of key compromise.

In Ozzi’s proposal, the private key never actually has to exist outside the environment it was created in, only the public key does. As pointed out in other comments, LE would not need access to the private key, either, they could simply submit the encrypted passcode to the manufacturer, who would then decrypt it on their behalf using the private key.