Item — HN Reader

Authorization by court order still works fine in physical space.

We are talking about introducing back-doors to what essentially already is an extension to our brains. If you understand computers, you know that analogies between the "real world" and our abstract world of modern information systems usually don't hold well.

Please try to think through all the subtleties, you clearly don't have to be labeled "libertarian" to foresee a death-by-a-thousand-cuts of our civil liberties (as with democracy, the US still sets global trends btw).

1 comments

> Authorization by court order still works fine in physical space.

That's an interesting question to evaluate by analogy, though.

Suppose you could, relatively easily, build a safe that nobody can enter without the combination (including the safe manufacturer). The government could serve a warrant to the person who has the combination, and you might even have to choose between opening the safe or going to jail, but if they chose the latter, they still can't get into the safe. They could point a camera at the safe, or rig the dials, so that the next time you open it you get the combination and can open it themselves; however, if you know or suspect they've done so, you can avoid ever touching the safe again, and they still don't have access. And serving a warrant to the safe manufacturer does no good at all, because everyone already knows everything about the safe except the combination.

Have you played "The Room"? I might just install it again right here on my smartphone after reading your comment - "fetishist" that I am :)

With that statement of mine I was mostly trying to convey how some things shouldn't be easy.

Let me try to paraphrase:

I'm sure that Sherlock would find a way to open that safe without a computer doing it for him!

To a certain degree I can understand the frustration of executive agencies over their apparent missing-out on all the shiny low-hanging fruit - but they shouldn't worry so much as the promises of most tech be it the use of "big data" or accessing our all-encompassing "personal assistants" ultimately won't free them of doing their jobs.

> With that statement of mine I was mostly trying to convey how some things shouldn't be easy.

I agree completely. I think attempts to paint this as a "reversal" of hundreds of years of governmental warrant procedure is ignoring that these new devices and this new data didn't exist hundreds of years ago. If we're going to put a huge amount of valuable data about our lives in one place, we'd better protect that place better than we've ever protected anything before.