Just to follow up on the Tweet below. It’s true that Apple caved to pressure by the Chinese govt, and this probably does harm the privacy of Chinese users. I would have been happier if they’d just left China. BUT. 1/n
Fundamentally, the lesson here is not “Apple and all firms are cynical about privacy and therefore their attempts to keep the US government out of your device are also revealed to be cynical.” 2/n
The appropriate lesson is: governments are powerful. If your government decides that ubiquitous surveillance is something they want, no private firm is going to stand up to them. Apple being crushed by China is an illustration of this. 3/n
Which is why it’s so important that in fundamental debates like “should unbreakable end-to-end encryption be possible”, in democracies its critical that people (voters and policy experts) take the right side. Rather than trying to play 4D chess. 4/n
By 4D chess I mean strategies like below. Where the idea is for tech firms to *voluntarily* concede the encryption debate by adding backdoors, on the theory that engaging large numbers of citizens (Apple v FBI) is somehow a bad idea.
I.e., that breaking encryption permanently, and making sure technical and anti-abuse mechanisms become a technical argument made outside the public sphere, we’re going to get stronger protections against bad outcomes. 5/n
This is illustrated by laws like the CLOUD Act, which reduces court oversight over law enforcement data requests. That bill had to be “snuck” into law by burying it in an omnibus bill. You don’t do this if you think “your side” has robust public support. 6/n
So to summarize a marginally incoherent thread: once gov’t has the power to decrypt your phone, history tells us they will only *remove* impediments and measures that protect security. There is no grand compromise here. 7/n
There is, however, an opportunity to have a robust public debate about *whether the US (and western) governments should have the power to bypass encryption at all*. We may lose that debate. But the idea that we will be “better off” without it is either cynical or naive. 8/8
