How did they find out Person Y's phone needed to be searched/monitored to begin with? Obviously they have other sources of intelligence.
The question also doesn't address the issue of how far is too far, imagine how many crimes would be discovered with nightly searches of everyone's homes. Should we begin searching everyone's homes warrantlessly? What is more detrimental to society, the criminals, or the police state?
What are they doing to do, deploy unremoveable malware on every phone by default? Because as long as phones have CPUs and we can tell them what to do, they can employ unbreakable encryption. How are they supposed to get around that? Mandatory spyware?
What did police do before the telephone was commonplace? Criminals met and still meet in speakeasies and other safe locations to communicate without a phone, are we gonna install mics in every room as part of new building codes?
If phones do become irreversibly broken and monitored, guess what, criminals will stop using phones. Kevin Gates (rapper) has a song about drug dealing called... I Don't Talk On Phones, lol.
tl;dr: surveillance state monitoring all phones just means criminals will stop using phones to communicate so its only going to hurt "legitimate" privacy.
First let me clarify that I agree the notion of "banning encryption" is misguided and wrong. I'm looking at Obama's position (perhaps incorrectly) as "we need to be able to have backdoors", not "ban encryption".
I think the government's argument would be that yes, the most sophisticated adversaries will always find a way around monitoring. But I think they'd argue that 95% of adversaries are not the most sophisticated, so the position to is to make it as easy as possible to catch that 95%.
"If we're trying to monitor 100 bad guys and 95 of them are just using iMessage, then let's make it easy to read what the 95 of them are saying and deal with the other 5 with more sophisticated countermeasures, rather than having to use more sophisticated countermeasures for all 100 of them."
I absolutely see the whole argument here. I'm just trying to figure out what the right solution is.
The question also doesn't address the issue of how far is too far, imagine how many crimes would be discovered with nightly searches of everyone's homes. Should we begin searching everyone's homes warrantlessly? What is more detrimental to society, the criminals, or the police state?
What are they doing to do, deploy unremoveable malware on every phone by default? Because as long as phones have CPUs and we can tell them what to do, they can employ unbreakable encryption. How are they supposed to get around that? Mandatory spyware?
What did police do before the telephone was commonplace? Criminals met and still meet in speakeasies and other safe locations to communicate without a phone, are we gonna install mics in every room as part of new building codes?
If phones do become irreversibly broken and monitored, guess what, criminals will stop using phones. Kevin Gates (rapper) has a song about drug dealing called... I Don't Talk On Phones, lol.
tl;dr: surveillance state monitoring all phones just means criminals will stop using phones to communicate so its only going to hurt "legitimate" privacy.