6 ms·

"The problem, according to Wray, is that law enforcement is stymied by phone encryption, which is now widespread." Not American, but isn't criminality in the U

by js8 9y ago

"The problem, according to Wray, is that law enforcement is stymied by phone encryption, which is now widespread." Not American, but isn't criminality in the U.S. like at about lowest point in history? Is there some actual evidence that the lack of ability to do mass surveillance is somehow making criminal investigations less effective?

anfedorov 9y ago
Source?
- IncRnd 9y ago
  The source is the first sentence in third paragraph of the article that you commented.
  - anfedorov 9y ago
    Link? Curious how one would go about measuring, e.g., criminal insider trading facilitated by wide-spread e2e encryption.
    - ch4s3 9y ago
      What evidence do you have to suggest the existence of this happening at any scale? The problem with large scale conspiracies is that they require a lot of people, and eventually someone slips up. This sort of crime is the bread and butter of the SEC, and they aren't making any claims about it increasing.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- ch4s3 9y ago
  Crime rates are the lowest they've been since 1970 at least, [1] and murder rates are the lowest since WWII[2]. [1] http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/427758/careful-panic-violent-crime-and-gun-crime-are-both-dropping-charles-c-w-cooke http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/427758/careful-panic-vi... [2] https://www.factcheck.org/2016/07/dueling-claims-on-crime-trend/ https://www.factcheck.org/2016/07/dueling-claims-on-crime-tr...
  - anfedorov 9y ago
    Violent crime, gun crime, murder rates. What other kinds of crime are there, and how would you measure how much of it there is?
    - Zak 9y ago
      Property crime is also down to around the rate of the mid 1960s. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=property+crime+rate http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=property+crime+rate
      - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
        Fraud is probably greatly increased.
        Retric 9y ago
        Fraud has largely moved outside of the US as Fraud takes a lot of legwork. In the 60's you also got a lot more check fraud. Which is similar to CC fraud, but that's again for more global.
        ben_w 9y ago
        Opinion or rational deduction from evidence?
    - ch4s3 9y ago
      Well, people tend to still report other crimes, like property crime, and police still investigate them. Sure, reporting rates aren't perfect but you can still draw meaningful conclusions from trends. I'm not going to do the leg work for you, but almost all types of crime are declining in the US and have been for decades. There's no data I've seen that suggest anything other than a broad decades long drop in crime.
    - maxander 9y ago
      What other kinds of crime are there due to which we're willing to give up our right to privacy? Several, perhaps, but remember that this conversation is happening while we're discussing a way in which too much law enforcement has significant downsides to a free and happy society. We wouldn't let the government monitor everyone constantly in order to catch shoplifters.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> Not American, but isn't criminality in the U.S. like at about lowest point in history? It's generally been declining since the trailing edge of the Baby Boomers got out of the prime criminality age range. But the demographically (and possibly also lead-exposure) driven “crime wave” was a boon to political support for law enforcement and authoritarian politicians, so both have learned that selling the idea of rampant crime is a good way to get what they want politically.
- cat199 9y ago
  > It's generally been declining since the trailing edge of the Baby Boomers got out of the prime criminality age range. Not sure if you are making a claim, but I don't really think this is generational other than a coincidence in technological timing - the time you are talking about is the 90's-2000s, which is when improved surveillance techniques, information sharing databases, and other deterrents became more possible and widely used. At that time most of the people on the ground would be gen-Xers (think 21 jumpstreet, colors, new jack city, boyz n the hood, etc, usa wise) Also, timing wise, the cold war ended and so along with it much of the foreign funny money on all sides for subversive activities, and police spending went up bigtime in most areas..
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > Not sure if you are making a claim, but I don't really think this is generational other than a coincidence in technological timing - the time you are talking about is the 90's-2000s, which is when improved surveillance techniques, information sharing databases, and other deterrents became more possible and widely used. As you say, most of that became available in the (mid-to-late-) 1990s and into the 2000s, the crime peak happened in the early 1990s (violent crime specifically in 1991.) There's something of a demographic case to be made (not so much generational as the fact that the Baby Boom was a boom, and a big demographic bulge going through that age range has an impact), there's a plausible, and arguably stronger, lead exposure case to be made (the decline, and the preceding rise, closely tracks the drop off, and preceding rise, in use of leaded gasoline.) The variety of intended policy mitigations adopted well after the peak certainly didn't cause the drop, and probably have no-to-minimal impact.
heroprotagonist 9y ago
Maybe that's the problem? That they want more criminals? I mean, it's always been a bit skewed. Example, Nixon targeting blacks, hippies, and the anti-war left: https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich... There's an intimidation factor behind the thought that the government can read any communication you make, if you give them cause, even if you aren't doing anything wrong.
- danjoc 9y ago
  >Nixon targeting blacks, hippies, and the anti-war left According to Dan Baum, after Ehrlichman died, years after Ehrlichman supposedly told him. Furthermore, even if Ehrlichman did tell him this, Ehrlichman was convicted of perjury, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice. Hearsay, from a convicted liar, retold by a biased individual with no apparent proof other than his own word.
  - heroprotagonist 9y ago
    > Hearsay, from a convicted liar, retold by a biased individual with no apparent proof other than his own word. This could also be posed as: > statement from at-the-time President's chief domestic advisor to a journalist during an interview, in 1994 But yeah, he's dead, and the fact that the reporter took so long to make it public makes it suspicious and doubtable. Your criticism is fair, but surely you can think of a few other examples if you dislike this one? MLK wiretapping, McCarthyism, etc? If not, and you are up for a read, check out this 69 page document from the ACLU: https://www.aclu.org/other/unleashed-and-unaccountable-fbis-unchecked-abuse-authority https://www.aclu.org/other/unleashed-and-unaccountable-fbis-...
    - danjoc 9y ago
      You already destroyed your credibility with the Ehrlichman point. If you try to mislead people, you lose trust. I don't need to read the aclu document. I'm not arguing with you. I'm pointing out that the moment you reference Ehrlichman in any way, you will lose all your credibility again. You do damage to your own causes when you try to mislead people like this.
ams6110 9y ago
So, we're back to what, the mid 1990s? Before anyone had a phone that stored any information at all? They should be grateful for the few decades of easy work. Now it's back to being real detectives.
- DarronWyke 9y ago
  Pretty much this. Law enforcement is trying to get their monetary share from crime (or "crime" depending upon how you look at it), and anything they can do to make that easier they want.
- stanleydrew 9y ago
  Not exactly. We used to have to keep many more paper records, which are really hard to manually encrypt/decrypt. Those were easily available to law enforcement.
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    The fact that paper records make many things more difficult meant that many fewer records were kept. For example, no one had a paper record of your exact location (or rather that of a flattish oblong chunk of plastic and metal that was always in your pocket), all day long every day of the year. No one had a record of which article in the newspaper you read first, how long you spent reading it, which article you read next, etc. No one had an audio recording of everything uttered in earshot of a stupid-looking speaker that sits in the kitchen of every bored housewife in the nation. All of those records exist now, and LEOs should have access to precisely none of them.
  - murftown 9y ago
    I'm pretty sure people leak a lot more data into the "cloud", through their SMS messages, emails, apps, etc., than they used to keep in their desk drawer. On average I presume that there is more for law enforcement to go on these days than before technology got so pervasive. And at least if they search your desk you know about it. The idea that people can go behind your back and look at your info is disconcerting.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
da_chicken 9y ago
> Not American, but isn't criminality in the U.S. like at about lowest point in history? Sort of. We're approaching 1960s level of crime, but it was lower in the early 60s and 50s. I don't know if we tracked it before then. Crime rates, including homicide rates, are about half of what they were 20 years ago, but about 20% higher than they were in the mid 50s. > Is there some actual evidence that the lack of ability to do mass surveillance is somehow making criminal investigations less effective? No. Police investigations still tend to use things called search warrants and interrogation of witnesses and suspects to acquire incriminating evidence. Mass surveillance is very expensive in order to be effective. I have family involved in law enforcement and they are able to request access to stingrays from state or federal police, but their use is fairly limited and still requires a search warrant in many cases. I don't believe it's gone to SCotUS yet, but many appellate courts have ruled that you've got to have one.
- toyg 9y ago
  > it was lower in the early 60s and 50s But there is reason to believe pre-1980 statistics had a huge problem of under-reporting more or less everywhere, especially in countries as big (and relatively desolate, at the time) as the US. Even just collating reliable statistics is a challenge today, let alone in the '50s. Nowadays we almost have the opposite problem, with cellphones and vague laws resulting in increased reporting of entire classes of crimes. So having a declining trend despite these development, is either a huge win or proof that statistics can be tweaked at will (as The Wire taught us, and we all know The Wire is all true... /s )
  - da_chicken 9y ago
    I agree the older crime statistics are a little suspect, but it's all we really have to go on. And, yeah, the US was a much bigger and much newer nation back then. The Apache Wars and other associated wars against the native Americans didn't wrap up until 1924! Crime statistics just weren't that important. > as The Wire taught us, and we all know The Wire is all true... /s I could never get in to The Wire. The very first scene of the very first episode is a courtroom where a woman changes her testimony on the stand, and the prosecutor doesn't: a) show the woman her sworn deposition, b) request an immediate continuance (surprise testimony is one of the things that warrants one), and c) threaten and then carry out charges of perjury against the woman for refusing to testify according to her statement. Instead, the prosecutor keeps asking questions over and over, driving into the jury's mind the woman's changed testimony. I'm not a lawyer, but I feel like I know something of courtroom procedure. This was just so unbelievable that it made me angry that the writers expected me to believe it. It would be like someone hacking a System/360 Model 30 from their iPhone in 10 seconds. I understand it was for dramatic purposes to lead to the other witness's murder, but it broke my suspension of disbelief so badly I had a hard time watching the rest of the episode. I don't remember if I ever watched the second episode.

by js8 9y ago

anfedorov 9y ago

Source?

IncRnd 9y ago
The source is the first sentence in third paragraph of the article that you commented.
- anfedorov 9y ago
  Link? Curious how one would go about measuring, e.g., criminal insider trading facilitated by wide-spread e2e encryption.
  - ch4s3 9y ago
    What evidence do you have to suggest the existence of this happening at any scale? The problem with large scale conspiracies is that they require a lot of people, and eventually someone slips up. This sort of crime is the bread and butter of the SEC, and they aren't making any claims about it increasing.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
ch4s3 9y ago
Crime rates are the lowest they've been since 1970 at least, [1] and murder rates are the lowest since WWII[2]. [1] http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/427758/careful-panic-violent-crime-and-gun-crime-are-both-dropping-charles-c-w-cooke http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/427758/careful-panic-vi... [2] https://www.factcheck.org/2016/07/dueling-claims-on-crime-trend/ https://www.factcheck.org/2016/07/dueling-claims-on-crime-tr...
- anfedorov 9y ago
  Violent crime, gun crime, murder rates. What other kinds of crime are there, and how would you measure how much of it there is?
  - Zak 9y ago
    Property crime is also down to around the rate of the mid 1960s. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=property+crime+rate http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=property+crime+rate
    - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
      Fraud is probably greatly increased.
      - Retric 9y ago
        Fraud has largely moved outside of the US as Fraud takes a lot of legwork. In the 60's you also got a lot more check fraud. Which is similar to CC fraud, but that's again for more global.
      - ben_w 9y ago
        Opinion or rational deduction from evidence?
  - ch4s3 9y ago
    Well, people tend to still report other crimes, like property crime, and police still investigate them. Sure, reporting rates aren't perfect but you can still draw meaningful conclusions from trends. I'm not going to do the leg work for you, but almost all types of crime are declining in the US and have been for decades. There's no data I've seen that suggest anything other than a broad decades long drop in crime.
  - maxander 9y ago
    What other kinds of crime are there due to which we're willing to give up our right to privacy? Several, perhaps, but remember that this conversation is happening while we're discussing a way in which too much law enforcement has significant downsides to a free and happy society. We wouldn't let the government monitor everyone constantly in order to catch shoplifters.

dragonwriter 9y ago

> Not American, but isn't criminality in the U.S. like at about lowest point in history? It's generally been declining since the trailing edge of the Baby Boomers got out of the prime criminality age range. But the demographically (and possibly also lead-exposure) driven “crime wave” was a boon to political support for law enforcement and authoritarian politicians, so both have learned that selling the idea of rampant crime is a good way to get what they want politically.

cat199 9y ago
> It's generally been declining since the trailing edge of the Baby Boomers got out of the prime criminality age range. Not sure if you are making a claim, but I don't really think this is generational other than a coincidence in technological timing - the time you are talking about is the 90's-2000s, which is when improved surveillance techniques, information sharing databases, and other deterrents became more possible and widely used. At that time most of the people on the ground would be gen-Xers (think 21 jumpstreet, colors, new jack city, boyz n the hood, etc, usa wise) Also, timing wise, the cold war ended and so along with it much of the foreign funny money on all sides for subversive activities, and police spending went up bigtime in most areas..
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Not sure if you are making a claim, but I don't really think this is generational other than a coincidence in technological timing - the time you are talking about is the 90's-2000s, which is when improved surveillance techniques, information sharing databases, and other deterrents became more possible and widely used. As you say, most of that became available in the (mid-to-late-) 1990s and into the 2000s, the crime peak happened in the early 1990s (violent crime specifically in 1991.) There's something of a demographic case to be made (not so much generational as the fact that the Baby Boom was a boom, and a big demographic bulge going through that age range has an impact), there's a plausible, and arguably stronger, lead exposure case to be made (the decline, and the preceding rise, closely tracks the drop off, and preceding rise, in use of leaded gasoline.) The variety of intended policy mitigations adopted well after the peak certainly didn't cause the drop, and probably have no-to-minimal impact.

heroprotagonist 9y ago

Maybe that's the problem? That they want more criminals? I mean, it's always been a bit skewed. Example, Nixon targeting blacks, hippies, and the anti-war left: https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich... There's an intimidation factor behind the thought that the government can read any communication you make, if you give them cause, even if you aren't doing anything wrong.

danjoc 9y ago
>Nixon targeting blacks, hippies, and the anti-war left According to Dan Baum, after Ehrlichman died, years after Ehrlichman supposedly told him. Furthermore, even if Ehrlichman did tell him this, Ehrlichman was convicted of perjury, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice. Hearsay, from a convicted liar, retold by a biased individual with no apparent proof other than his own word.
- heroprotagonist 9y ago
  > Hearsay, from a convicted liar, retold by a biased individual with no apparent proof other than his own word. This could also be posed as: > statement from at-the-time President's chief domestic advisor to a journalist during an interview, in 1994 But yeah, he's dead, and the fact that the reporter took so long to make it public makes it suspicious and doubtable. Your criticism is fair, but surely you can think of a few other examples if you dislike this one? MLK wiretapping, McCarthyism, etc? If not, and you are up for a read, check out this 69 page document from the ACLU: https://www.aclu.org/other/unleashed-and-unaccountable-fbis-unchecked-abuse-authority https://www.aclu.org/other/unleashed-and-unaccountable-fbis-...
  - danjoc 9y ago
    You already destroyed your credibility with the Ehrlichman point. If you try to mislead people, you lose trust. I don't need to read the aclu document. I'm not arguing with you. I'm pointing out that the moment you reference Ehrlichman in any way, you will lose all your credibility again. You do damage to your own causes when you try to mislead people like this.

ams6110 9y ago

So, we're back to what, the mid 1990s? Before anyone had a phone that stored any information at all? They should be grateful for the few decades of easy work. Now it's back to being real detectives.

DarronWyke 9y ago
Pretty much this. Law enforcement is trying to get their monetary share from crime (or "crime" depending upon how you look at it), and anything they can do to make that easier they want.
stanleydrew 9y ago
Not exactly. We used to have to keep many more paper records, which are really hard to manually encrypt/decrypt. Those were easily available to law enforcement.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  The fact that paper records make many things more difficult meant that many fewer records were kept. For example, no one had a paper record of your exact location (or rather that of a flattish oblong chunk of plastic and metal that was always in your pocket), all day long every day of the year. No one had a record of which article in the newspaper you read first, how long you spent reading it, which article you read next, etc. No one had an audio recording of everything uttered in earshot of a stupid-looking speaker that sits in the kitchen of every bored housewife in the nation. All of those records exist now, and LEOs should have access to precisely none of them.
- murftown 9y ago
  I'm pretty sure people leak a lot more data into the "cloud", through their SMS messages, emails, apps, etc., than they used to keep in their desk drawer. On average I presume that there is more for law enforcement to go on these days than before technology got so pervasive. And at least if they search your desk you know about it. The idea that people can go behind your back and look at your info is disconcerting.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

da_chicken 9y ago

> Not American, but isn't criminality in the U.S. like at about lowest point in history? Sort of. We're approaching 1960s level of crime, but it was lower in the early 60s and 50s. I don't know if we tracked it before then. Crime rates, including homicide rates, are about half of what they were 20 years ago, but about 20% higher than they were in the mid 50s. > Is there some actual evidence that the lack of ability to do mass surveillance is somehow making criminal investigations less effective? No. Police investigations still tend to use things called search warrants and interrogation of witnesses and suspects to acquire incriminating evidence. Mass surveillance is very expensive in order to be effective. I have family involved in law enforcement and they are able to request access to stingrays from state or federal police, but their use is fairly limited and still requires a search warrant in many cases. I don't believe it's gone to SCotUS yet, but many appellate courts have ruled that you've got to have one.

toyg 9y ago
> it was lower in the early 60s and 50s But there is reason to believe pre-1980 statistics had a huge problem of under-reporting more or less everywhere, especially in countries as big (and relatively desolate, at the time) as the US. Even just collating reliable statistics is a challenge today, let alone in the '50s. Nowadays we almost have the opposite problem, with cellphones and vague laws resulting in increased reporting of entire classes of crimes. So having a declining trend despite these development, is either a huge win or proof that statistics can be tweaked at will (as The Wire taught us, and we all know The Wire is all true... /s )
- da_chicken 9y ago
  I agree the older crime statistics are a little suspect, but it's all we really have to go on. And, yeah, the US was a much bigger and much newer nation back then. The Apache Wars and other associated wars against the native Americans didn't wrap up until 1924! Crime statistics just weren't that important. > as The Wire taught us, and we all know The Wire is all true... /s I could never get in to The Wire. The very first scene of the very first episode is a courtroom where a woman changes her testimony on the stand, and the prosecutor doesn't: a) show the woman her sworn deposition, b) request an immediate continuance (surprise testimony is one of the things that warrants one), and c) threaten and then carry out charges of perjury against the woman for refusing to testify according to her statement. Instead, the prosecutor keeps asking questions over and over, driving into the jury's mind the woman's changed testimony. I'm not a lawyer, but I feel like I know something of courtroom procedure. This was just so unbelievable that it made me angry that the writers expected me to believe it. It would be like someone hacking a System/360 Model 30 from their iPhone in 10 seconds. I understand it was for dramatic purposes to lead to the other witness's murder, but it broke my suspension of disbelief so badly I had a hard time watching the rest of the episode. I don't remember if I ever watched the second episode.