Think back even before technology. The police weren’t allowed to sneak on your property and search it, or hide on it to surreptitiously listen to your conversat

Think back even before technology. The police weren’t allowed to sneak on your property and search it, or hide on it to surreptitiously listen to your conversations, without a court order. This was to protect your privacy rights, as well as restrain over-reaching government agents. Now let’s assume 200 years ago all of your property was exposed so that any potentially dangerous people (robbers, horse thiefs, politicians) approaching your house could be easily seen. But this also means that federal agents coming to serve warrants could be seen with enough warning to allow you to destroy evidence, and anytime they’d try to surveil your house, you’d know they were there. Should it be illegal for your property to be so exposed? Should the government force property owners to plant shrubbery on approaches to their homes to make them easier to secretly surveil, and so surprise searches can be more successful? The difference between this and wiretapping is that wiretapping didn’t require you to change your property to allow it. The police merely tapped into existing infrastructure. I say “didn’t” because that stopped being true years ago. The feds were successful at forcing telecoms to alter their systems and equipment to make survellience easier, especially mass survellience. Now the FBI thinks that since they can force telecoms to put backdoors in their own equipment, they can also force companies to put backdoors in customers equipment. Let’s go back 200 years again where encryption was a popular way to assure the privacy of important messages and papers. Let’s assume public/private key encryption was discovered, and companies spring up where they create unbreakable private/public combos for citizens to use to encrypt their messages and letters. The companies agree to protect their customers by never recording the private keys they generate for them. Federal agents are outraged, and demand the companies record citizens private keys and store them permanently so whenever a court ruled federal agents could have them those agents could read any citizens private papers and letters. And that the citizens aren’t allowed to know when their keys have been compromised. Can you imagine the theft, blackmail and other possibilities? That’s exactly what the FBI wants now.