NY Demands Holes in your Phone's Security

The NY Assembly has put forth a bill requiring phone makers -- Apple, Google, Samsung, Blackberry, etc. -- to break encryption on all phones sold in NY state, or pay a $2,500 per phone fine.

This is a laughably crappy idea, since it should be obvious to anyone who has read the news in the past twenty years that the likelihood of law enforcement using this successfully to stop terrorists* is about 100x less than the likelihood of criminals finding the leaks of info how to use it, and committing identity theft or worse on a few million phone users.

The obvious stop to it, of course, is for Apple (and all the other manufacturers -- but Apple's leadership is key here) simply to announce:

iPhones will no longer be sold or activated in New York.  So sorry.  Call your assemblyman if you don't like this; it was their idea.

The ban would last about 15 minutes after that news broke.

* - "Terrorists!" is this century's cry of someone with a hidden, evil agenda, just as "Communists!" was last century's.