I hate this meme.
The point is to at least make them resort to hitting you with the $5 wrench, at which point they're probably committing a more serious offence than what you're up for (dependent on country).
I hate this meme.
The point is to at least make them resort to hitting you with the $5 wrench, at which point they're probably committing a more serious offence than what you're up for (dependent on country).
Doesn't have to be a literal wrench right? A government can trivially and legally make you miss the itinerary that made your holiday possible that you've saved up for the rest of the year with no restitution that I'm aware of in any jurisdiction. They can confiscate 'evidence' (any computer and (backup) storage media in your house) for years. They can do a heck of a lot that's more annoying than medium amounts of wrench swinging
And as for street thugs, sure it won't be a wrench, more likely they'll flash a knife and unkindly suggest you remove the lock screen
Taken as a metaphor rather than a literal wrench, you don't think it's accurate?
> A government can trivially and legally make you miss the itinerary that made your holiday possible that you've saved up for the rest of the year with no restitution that I'm aware of in any jurisdiction. They can confiscate 'evidence' (any computer and (backup) storage media in your house) for years.
This could be preferable to handing over private data about contacts, communications, sources, client information, etc. Especially if it has life-changing implications for yourself or other people!
The wrench attack is still far weaker than a push-button attack.
In the wrench attack you are aware that you have been attacked, and you're aware of what data the attacker gains.
Additionally there are schemes like deniable encryption which can mitigate the outcomes of such an attack or serve as a red herring.
Furthermore it's dependent on physical intimidation which is expensive to scale and can be met with your own physical intimidation. In order for a wrench attack to scale to an entire society you have to send the gestapo to everyone's house whereas push-button attacks scale by default unbenownst to the victims and enable more nefarious systems to be built on top of them. In the USA this would mean interrogating some well armed citizens.
Lastly, you aren't forced to give up the key by any means. They can torture you to death and there is nothing they can do if you don't want to give up the key. There are some secrets in the game of love and war that are worth taking to - it's why spies are equipped with cyanide pills.
Missing a holiday is usually not such a bad price to save you from whatever the government is considering doing to you.
The point of the comic is pretty obviously to make fun of the expectations of cryptography geeks; you know, the sort of people who use 4096 bit RSA keys for the coolness factor. It is a stretch to imply it is suggesting that encryption is somehow futile.
The United States has famously shot and killed protesters in the Vietnam war era. They have dedicated torture facilities for people suspected, not even convicted, of terrorism. Police officers use lethal violence for no reason every month and rarely get more than a talking to.
In a perfect society, your point makes sense, but I don't see why the authorities in the real world would need to care about committing a worse crime.
You end up getting hit by a wrench though, that doesn't sound like it ends well for you.
If you're that much of a coward, you won't get hit by a wrench anyways because you will give your keys up immediately. But you will force your enemy to exert additional effort.
It works for the same reason locks on houses work against cops or criminals, despite the existence of lockpicking and locksmiths. There are various layers of physical security, and while no layer can prevent an attack absolutely they each increase the cost of an attack.
The system is only as secure as it's weakest layer.
So in a mixed information/physical system like a smartphone why should we allow the weak point to be the information system? To improve the information system we need only to rewrite the software, so the per-unit cost is nothing in the large.
Liberty is given up in inches, not miles.
The offenses of a regime at its apex would've led to it being stopped had they started out that way, but they didn't.
What you've hit on is the basic problem of treating privacy as a means to an end though: no level of it protects you from fascism, but it is a means by which fascism can be opposed - in many cases at personal cost to yourself.
In theory I have no secrets, and the contents of my phone or life if public would be of no consequence to me. In practice, when the regime starts flustering itself that I have no secrets for them to reveal the hopefully people will oppose it - or I get a decent warning that it's time to bail.
Sounds like something a coward would say, honestly.
Everyone thinks they're brave until they get punched in the face. The fact that a handful of terrorist attacks decades ago were all it took to push society into voting for control freaks who built a worldwide surveillance state to nanny them tells me all I need to know about how brave people really are.