Arguably making it harder for enforcement agency to do their jobs. I believe this is their burden to bear and work with, since privacy for every citizens is also important.

Tell you what. The minute the entire government and FBI start recording their activities openly on an immutable blockchain, or at least every police officer wears a bodycam on-duty, we can talk about handing over keys for all citizen data being open to said government. But still hard to search and index en masse.

And same goes for every other government. Why should the government can do whatever they want secretly?

I can't speak for all governments, but in the US the National Archives has responsibility for recording the things the federal government undertakes on behalf of the people. This includes even the tapes Nixon made of his own conversations as President.

The guiding principle the US government operates on in this context is "When a man assumes a public trust he should consider himself a public property" (Thomas Jefferson). There are plenty of ways the fed falls short of the goal, but the goal is set.

... and I don't think anyone's talking about "handing over the keys for all citizen data being open to said government." But we are talking about avoiding having common practice for private citizen information stored in servers owned by a third-party private corporation becoming "It's stored in such a way that nobody, not even the third-party private corporation, can ever access the data without a key the private citizen can throw away." There are some good cost-benefit discussions to be had about whether that should be a thing commonly offered (even if an individual can build it themselves).

To give a concrete example, imagine if Epstein's data on the human trafficking he conducted were impossibly ciphered now in an iCloud backup he made. Does that benefit society? And more practically (regardless of larger ideal morality questions), is it a good PR look for Apple if their tech made it easy for him to do and when the fed comes knocking on Apple's door to retrieve from Apple's servers a dead man's documents that could bring justice for sex-trafficked children, Apple's response was "Sorry; we don't have enough computing power to help you?"

It’s only a matter of time before easy-to-use open source technology becomes available to everyone to host and they won’t need Apple to manage their data.

Unless you mean Apple should be actively trying to siphon off private data via their OS and hardware and index it for the feds?

I would then say Apple’s “trusted computing base” isn’t so trusted.

> It’s only a matter of time before easy-to-use open source technology becomes available to everyone

I believe people have been saying that to me for thirty years now, but I'm younger than my peers. ;)

In the context of cloud services specifically, I think that's even less true than in the OS space. Half the benefit of clouds is someone else is maintaining the infrastructure, the backups, the ubiquitous connectivity, etc. None of those are trivial to handle as a solo project, and attempts to make them easier compete with free (as in time).

I agree that the resopnsibility is on the FBI to do investigation, but transitioning from a world where private documents are irretrievable without a warrant to one where they're structurally irretrievable because of mathematics and computational limitation would fundamentally alter the balance of power between society and individuals within that society in ways that society hasn't had to explore. It's something that's worth thinking deeply about before leaping upon it.

Part of the FBI's responsibility of investigation is to surface this concern to companies that have the power to make that world a reality, and it appears Apple has agreed with them on the risks.