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Playing devil's advocate here, but instantaneous long-distance communication is also a very recent development, historically speaking. Traditional investigation

by ecdavis 11y ago

Playing devil's advocate here, but instantaneous long-distance communication is also a very recent development, historically speaking. Traditional investigation methods relied on tracking people's movements, who they associated with and so forth. Digital communication has almost completely removed the requirement for non-digital criminal relationships. As we saw with the DPR hired-killer case, two people can collaborate to perform a crime with zero non-digital connections. How do you use traditional methods in a world where criminals can just go about their daily lives, pausing occasionally to send a message to someone who could be a co-conspirator or could just be their mother? I don't think subverting encryption is necessarily the answer, but to say that law enforcement just wants to do things the easy way is to ignore the emergence of a very real problem that they face.

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
The government has admitted that it is impossible to reliably extract one party's communication without either watching all the time, or having the ability to do so, and I don't think it's for a lack of creativity. In a way we were spoiled by wiretapping because now we have set the expectation for hard, recorded evidence to be the standard, because facts can't lie. Thing is, this new age is a bigger can of worms than encryption versus the government is always watching. It could be 10 years away, it could be 50, but a computer will someday be able to generate your voice, create a fake video of your actions, and the state could put you away for nothing - and everyone could believe it. Neither of you are wrong. Machines can be fooled by prior, and people can be fooled by machines.