Everyone keeps writing these doomed takes about how “the US government is going to force tech companies to comply with surveillance, so they might as well just give in preemptively.” Like it’s inevitable and we should just hope for what scraps of privacy we can.
Even I was pessimistic last week. What I’ve seen in the past week has renewed my faith in my fellow countrymen — or at least made me realize how tired and fed up of invasive tech surveillance they really are.
People are really mad. They know that they used to be able to have private family photo albums and letters, and they could use computers without thinking about who else had their information. And they’re looking for someone to blame for the fact that this has changed.
People are telling me that Apple are “shocked” that they’re getting so much pushback from this proposal. They thought they could dump it last Friday and everyone would have accepted it by the end of the weekend.
I think that reflects Apple accepting the prevailing wisdom that everyone is just fine having tech companies scan their files, as long as it’s helping police. But that’s not the country we actually live in anymore.
Anyway, I don’t revel in the fact that Apple stuck their heads up and got them run over by a lawn mower. I like a lot of the people on Apple’s security team (I turned down a job there a few years ago.) But people need to update their priors.
At the end of the day, tech companies do care a lot about what their users want. Apple has heartburn about this *not* because Congress passed a law and they have to do it. They’re panicked because they did it to themselves, and they can’t blame Congress.
A few folks in Congress, for their part, have been trying for years to pass new laws that force providers to include mandatory backdoors like this new Apple one. They failed repeatedly. In part they failed because these systems aren’t popular.
And so the shell game has been to play one against the other. Congress can’t quite pass laws requiring backdoors because there’s no popular support. But providers somehow have to do it voluntarily because otherwise Congress will pass laws. 
And as an addendum: tech companies are incredibly risk averse, stupid beasts. They don’t take risks. They don’t stick their necks out. They do the thing that seems safe, and collaborating with law enforcement always *feels* safe.
(Dumb tech companies are filled with brilliant people. But the basic economics tell them to be conservative and stupid.)
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