A couple of weeks ago Google announced that Android phones would soon have their contents encrypted by default. The encryption key would be set by the user and Google wouldn’t keep a copy. This means that if police get a warrant to search a cell phone, they can’t get the encryption key from Google. The owner of the phone will have to cough it up.
This is how search warrants work in every other walk of life, but law enforcement agencies were nonetheless frustrated over Google’s new policy. The Washington Post sympathizes with their frustration, and yesterday they mounted a fairly standard defense of the law enforcement position. But then they ended with this:
How to resolve this? A police “back door” for all smartphones is undesirable — a back door can and will be exploited by bad guys, too. However, with all their wizardry, perhaps Apple and Google could invent a kind of secure golden key they would retain and use only when a court has approved a search warrant. Ultimately, Congress could act and force the issue, but we’d rather see it resolved in law enforcement collaboration with the manufacturers and in a way that protects all three of the forces at work: technology, privacy and rule of law.
A “secure golden key”? Seriously? Did they bother talking to anyone more technically savvy than their publisher’s nine-year-old grandkid about this?
If you’re going to opine about this stuff, you owe it to your readers to do at least a minimal amount of reporting and research about what’s possible and what’s not. Otherwise you sound like an idiot.
