Serious question (about practicality, not ethics): people always say that it's impossible to provide government access to encrypted data without opening a huge security hole for hackers to exploit. Why couldn't an encryption scheme be used that, for decryption, requires either a) the user's private key (a usual), or b) some sort of combination of private keys of all the relevant government entities required to authorize accessing the user's data? So that something like the combination of a judicial private key and an fbi private key were required to access the data?
Of course the data would still be hackable if a bad actor were to get their hands on both of those keys, but security could be increased by, for example, increasing the number of parties needed to authorize the access.
(Please don't critique the ethical premise here - I make no claim that this is the "right" thing to do, just that it could be plausible)
Of course the data would still be hackable if a bad actor were to get their hands on both of those keys, but security could be increased by, for example, increasing the number of parties needed to authorize the access.
(Please don't critique the ethical premise here - I make no claim that this is the "right" thing to do, just that it could be plausible)