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I find it disturbing how the intelligence and law enforcement community seem to think there is some kind of natural right for them to snoop on people. In case
by krylon 11y ago
I find it disturbing how the intelligence and law enforcement community seem to think there is some kind of natural right for them to snoop on people.
In case of the good old phone system, the very way that worked maked wiretapping very easy. The same was true for physical mail (one major reason why most states created and held on to the monopoly on mail for so long).
With email and IM this is - again due to the way this works - a lot more difficult. Artificially restricting encryption just so they can keep on doing things the way they're used to is a bad idea, and kind of naive, too.
- edraferi 11y agoYou're correct to point out that this debate is about a change in the staus quo: law enforcement used to be able to access the dominant communications system with a lawful order, proper crypto removes that capability. It is inevitable that this change, lwft unchecked, will increase citizen privacy AND decrease law enforcement effectiveness. The HN community is very aware of these privacy benefits, but skeptical about the security costs. I wonder how far security must slip before those costs become apparent. Until that happens, we basically have two camps of experts talking past eachother. The tech community sees the privacy cost, the law enforcement sees the security cost. Both back up their claims with "trust us, this is what we do for a living." This makes it very difficult to create a policy solution.
- nickik 11y agoActually the availabitly of data has massivly increased. They have access to far more thing then they ever had. We have few ways to hide metadata and those are of major imprtance. Investigating crime is now far easier the it was at any time beore 1995 and the world did go to shit then.