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FBI Director: Without Compromise on Encryption, Legislation May Be the 'Remedy' (cyberscoop.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: FBI Director Christopher Wray said Wednesday that unless the U.S. government and private industry are able to come to a compromise on the issue of default encryption on consumer devices, legislation may be how the debate is ultimately decided. "I think there should be [room for compromise]," Wray said Wednesday night at a national security conference in Aspen, Colorado. "I don't want to characterize private conversations we're having with people in the industry. We're not there yet for sure. And if we can't get there, there may be other remedies, like legislation, that would have to come to bear." Wray described the issue of "Going Dark" because of encryption as a "significant" and "growing" problem for federal, state and local law enforcement as well as foreign law enforcement and intelligence agencies. He claims strong encryption on mobile phones keeps law enforcement from gaining access to key evidence as it relates to active criminal investigations. "People are less safe as a result of it," he said.
It is not the job of the security services to prevent crime/terrorism/kiddie porn/copyright infringement/whatever. It is their job to investigate after the fact in order to convict those responsible. That's how our justice system works. The only justification for the ability to decrypt all encryption is for (attempted - in reality it will never work) prevention.
After a crime has been committed, in order to obtain evidence, the authorities can always obtain a warrant to compel a device owner to decrypt/unlock a device. If the owner refuses, that's what contempt of court is for. If the device owner is dead, who gives a fuck what's on the phone? If the owner (presumed criminal) is willing to sit in jail indefinitely for refusing to unlock/decrypt, that is an acceptable outcome.
Fuck you, go to jail.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article214948205.html
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is untrue. Scholars in the middle ages were mistaken about many aspects of cosmology, to be sure, but the whole flat Earth business is a myth in more ways than one. First, it's important to understand that there were no official dogmas on these matters. But setting that fact aside (which requires a discussion of how dogma, canons, and councils work), there's a more directly relevant fact. The major Christian teachers during the middle ages treated the world as spherical. Hell, even the guys who objected to Galileo in later years thought of the world as spherical.
The reasons for this have to with the Aristotelian physics to which the objectors to Galileo were regrettably too committed. To oversimplify their position: earth (dirt, minerals, etc.) and water goes down; air and fire go up. If the former go down from all directions and the latter go up, you cannot but have a spherical planet with airy, firey (and quintessential!) things above it. Indeed, the objection to Galileo is based partly on this Aristotelian understanding of the elements (How can the Earth be moving in a circular fashion if the natural motion of its primary constituent--earth--is simply down?). To be sure, we have a better understanding of physics today than did the scholastic disciples of Aristotle, but I hope you can see that even in their view a flat Earth is incoherent.
TL;DR: Neither the Church nor educated medieval folk in general bought into any flat Earth nonsense. This is merely a popular myth. Modern flat Earthers are even behind Aristotle (d. 322 B.C.) on this one. Now, whether the spherical Earth was thought of as moving or fixed in the center of the universe is another story altogether...
P.s. I only offer this lengthy correction because sometimes I fear we give modern flat Earthers the appearance of having even more credit than they deserve. Conspiratorial minds can dismiss claims of what we can discover with government funded rockets and satellites. "No one believed this round earth stuff until the government forced it on us all and fabricated the evidence!" My response is something along the lines of, "Come on. Medieval people knew the Earth was round. Eratosthenes had a pretty good estimation of its size, given the limited tools he was working with. Come join the third century B.C., will you? Grab a pocket calculator and look down a well."