I think that quote is saying that if you modify your public key locally then the data you encrypt with it will no longer be decryptable by the private key you previously sent backblaze.
> If that's true, as an iCloud user you are exactly as likely to be charged with a crime based on your photos as you were before
Is this strictly true? I feel like the evidence that a photo was present on specific device is different from evidence that a photo was uploaded by a specific account (and a specific ip address probably).
It seems like it would be far easier for the government to justify a search warrant if they have evidence the photo they are looking for was on a specific device. Just having evidence that a specific account uploaded a photo seems like far shakier grounds to search a specific device, after all accounts are often stolen to be used for criminal purposes and ip addresses don't map cleanly to people or devices.
They actually can be forced to reveal sources, the choice not to force them to reveal sources was executive branch policy not law and this policy was rescinded by the Obama administration. I think they realized this was pretty bad optics though so Obama and Trump mostly just relied on using their broad intelligence powers to track down reporter's sources.
"Freedom of the press" in US law just means the freedom to create and distribute media (as opposed to freedom of speech which is specifically about the spoken word). "The press" references the printing press not the news media or journalists who are in modern times called "the press" also in reference to the printing press. Journalists have the same first amendment rights as everyone else (actually they could be said to have less because for certain purposes such as defamation they are actually held to a higher standard).
And yet other laws require the collection and retention of sensitive user data, in particular any service that allows for transmission of large amounts of money (crypto exchanges were a good example).
What is the one language? json serialized data can be consumed in many different languages which have very different numeric data types. The json spec even says
> JSON is agnostic about the semantics of numbers. In any programming language, there can be a variety of
number types of various capacities and complements, fixed or floating, binary or decimal. That can make
interchange between different programming languages difficult. JSON instead offers only the representation of
numbers that humans use: a sequence of digits. All programming languages know how to make sense of digit
sequences even if they disagree on internal representations. That is enough to allow interchange
and later more precisely defines a number in a way that does not restrict its maximum size.
> A number is a sequence of decimal digits with no superfluous leading zero. It may have a preceding minus
sign (U+002D). It may have a fractional part prefixed by a decimal point (U+002E). It may have an exponent,
prefixed by e (U+0065) or E (U+0045) and optionally + (U+002B) or – (U+002D). The digits are the code
points U+0030 through U+0039.