Time to get rid of your Liberty gun safes

[cory]

You understand that you don't have to comply with a search warrant in which you are not named, right? For example, the cops are serving a warrant on your best friend's house and learn you have a key to the house. Do you give them the key? You aren't named in the warrant. The house isn't yours. The 4th amendment still applies to you and the key you possess to your buddy's house. When you provide the cops with the key, you think your buddy will be happy with you? Your excuse will be that you complied with a warrant which had nothing to do with you.

Liberty complied with a valid warrant, true enough. The problem was that they were not served with a warrant, nor were they named in the warrant, and even if the safe was named in the warrant, they were not. They gave access to property that was not their property to give access to, and that is the real problem.

That's fair. However, I stand by my point. The problem isn't what they did. The real problem is that they could do it.

As for the back doors, I will let you in on a little secret. If you didn't build the electronic lock yourself and from scratch, then it is going to have a back door, master code, etc. I am sorry you didn't realize that in advance. Why do they do this? Because consumers are idiots and lose and forget their combinations. It allows them to provide service after the sale when the customer needs it. The best part is that they can provide the service for a charge that requires minimal effort or expense on their part and they help out customers on a regular basis like this.

If the back door on your safe bothers you, then if you have purchased a car within the last decade, you aren't going to be happy at all.

I'm not happy with the current state of things. I take steps to secure the technology I use and where I can't I choose to accept the risk or I avoid the technology. I expect modern "secure" systems to abide by modern cyber security practices.

If you didn't build the electronic lock yourself and from scratch, then it is going to have a back door, master code, etc.

That's technically incorrect and the distinction makes all the difference in the world. It's going to have a backdoor/master code if the programmer, coded in a back door/master code. It's a function of the firmware, not the hardware.
If you want to sell a lock and offer to keep a master code on file as a service to the consumer that's fine. However, that's not what Liberty has done. They have deceived the consumer. They advertise what a reasonable person would assume is a secured system outside of extraneous circumstances. A secured system doesn't have master codes nor is the access code accessible to joe blow. I thought I was buying a secure system, at least as secure as I could get in that price range. What I actually got was big brother's "safe".

What Liberty has done, beyond work with the state to violate the property rights of one of their customers, is extremely unethical at best and fraudulent at worst. I'd argue it's far closer to the latter than the former.