If you’ve been paying attention to the fight between Apple and the FBI over the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, you’ve probably heard the term “warrant-proof phones” thrown about in an ominous way. In his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on March 1, FBI director James Comey said, “We’re moving to a place where there are warrant-proof places in our life … That’s a world we’ve never lived in before in the United States.” In its response to a court filing Apple made in California, the government claimed that the “modest burden” Apple faces in complying with the FBI’s request is “largely a result of Apple’s own decision to design and market a nearly warrant-proof phone.”
This is a curious argument. For most of mankind’s history, the overwhelming majority of our communications were warrant-proof in the sense that they just disappeared. They were ephemeral conversations. Even wiretapping was limited to intercepting phone transmissions, not retrieving past conversations. For law enforcement purposes, encrypted phones are equally inaccessible: no one can recover information from them. But Comey’s description of warrant-proof technologies is vague enough to apply to many different things. We should use a different term if we care about the preserving the ephemerality of some communications. Otherwise we might end up with a requirement to store everything.
To read more, click here.