  We present Judge, Jury and Encryptioner (JJE) an exceptional access scheme
for unlocking devices that does not give unilateral power to any single
authority. JJE achieves this by placing final approval to unlock a device in
the hands of peer devices. JJE distributes maintenance of the protocol across a
network of "custodians" such as courts, government agencies, civil rights
watchdogs, and academic institutions. Unlock requests, however, can only be
approved by a randomly selected set of recently active peer devices that must
be physically located by law enforcement in order to gain access to the locked
device. This requires that law enforcement expend both human and monetary
resources and pay a "social cost" in order to find and request the
participation of random device owners in the unlock process. Compared to other
proposed exceptional access schemes, we believe that JJE mitigates the risk of
mass surveillance, law enforcement abuse, and vulnerability to unlawful
attackers. While we propose a concrete construction, our primary goal with JJE
is to spur discussion on ethical exceptional access schemes that balance
privacy of individuals and the desires for law enforcement. JJE transparently
reveals the use of exceptional access to the public and enforces a fixed social
cost that, we believe, can be an effective deterrent to mass surveillance and
abuse.
