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The problem is that the existing societal solutions have a pretty hard bottleneck: It requires a physical person to show up at your door with a warrant to "rifl
by mordocai 11y ago
The problem is that the existing societal solutions have a pretty hard bottleneck: It requires a physical person to show up at your door with a warrant to "rifle through your underwear drawer" as the president put it. It's relatively hard for someone else to take advantage of this (though, put on a fake police uniform and bring a fake warrant and you can probably get into most people's houses while risking some really nasty charges).
With encryption, any solution I've seen suggested has the risk of mass use by the government in addition to allowing other people besides the government to use it.
- ska 11y agoThis is an incredibly important point. It is arguably baked into the nature of policing that such institutions will over-reach their authority and attempt to consolidate it. Usually for all the right motivations, but they have systematic blinders to the unintended consequences and risks. For this reason, there must be effective counterbalances, and demonstrably court and board oversight is insufficient. Hence it is important that for some actions that police are legally enabled to do, they remain too expensive (in time, manpower, money, whatever) to do habitually or without thought and prioritization. Pretty much any technological advantage that facilitates parallel construction should probably be resisted for this reason.