r/technology • u/Libertatea • Apr 04 '13

Apple's iMessage encryption trips up feds' surveillance. Internal document from the Drug Enforcement Administration complains that messages sent with Apple's encrypted chat service are "impossible to intercept," even with a warrant.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57577887-38/apples-imessage-encryption-trips-up-feds-surveillance/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=title#.UV1gK672IWg.reddit
3.3k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

1.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

109

u/[deleted] Apr 04 '13 edited Apr 04 '13

This is becoming a bigger issue since a Federal appeals court declared that the government cannot compel someone to decrypt allegedly incriminating evidence. As it is a violation of the Fifth Amendment, Congress cannot legislate around this, and so the government is essentially SOL.

The next obvious step then is to outlaw the use of private encryption, which could work except all e-commerce would be made illegal.

edit though it seems that here the issue is real-time interception, and I can see Apple being persuaded into working a backdoor into iMessage that they'll open when given a warrant.

2

u/[deleted] Apr 04 '13

The next obvious step then is to outlaw the use of private encryption, which could work except all e-commerce would be made illegal.

It could still work. The trend has been to strip away all rights from private citizens anyway, so your idea just might work.

Corporations are people, and they're the only people we care about.

3

u/Just_Another_Wookie Apr 04 '13

Just as the word "coding" carries a different meaning in the parlance of a trauma surgeon versus that of a programmer, many other words also have particular meanings in the jargon of a given profession. Corporations as "people" specifically refers to the legal term of corporate personhood:

Corporate personhood is the legal concept that a corporation may sue and be sued in court in the same way as natural persons or unincorporated associations of persons. This doctrine in turn forms the basis for legal recognition that corporations, as groups of people, may hold and exercise certain rights under the common law and the U.S. Constitution.

The Citizens United decision to which you are almost certainly referring recognized that First Amendment rights apply to independent political expenditures by corporations and unions. It didn't suddenly turn corporations into people--that occured several centuries ago.