As new technologies emerge and proliferate, they'll inevitably be used by criminals to harm citizens, businesses, and the local community. I can tell you firsth

As new technologies emerge and proliferate, they'll inevitably be used by criminals to harm citizens, businesses, and the local community. I can tell you firsthand (at least for murderers in Chicago, where I work as a crime analyst), encryption definitely helps killers get away with murder (based on the number of incriminating texts I've seen in instances where, with legal authorization (ie a search warrant approved by a judge), it's been possible to access an unwilling suspect's phone). I'm not arguing that we should get rid of encryption, (nor am I saying it's even possible to defeat encryption at scale, so it was probably a bad example to go with when call detail records would have been better, but I should really be working right now), rather, I'm saying we should let law enforcement keep up with the level of technology, but we should have strong auditing processes and don't allow for situations like the FISA/FISC situation where proceedings are nearly always literally one-sided (only prosecution, defense is necessarily excluded from the proceeding) [0]. New powers will be required to deal with new situations. The SARS-CoV-2 virus, for example, has killed more Chicagoans in the past 2 months than homicide has in the past 3 years, and that is also ravaging the economy as people are correctly afraid of going out in public. Currently most people are isolating because we don't have a more precise way of separating the infected from the uninfected, but China's digital contact tracing QR-code scheme provides a much more precise separator (and per an episode of This American Life [1] that I just listened to, it actually made at least the interviewee more comfortable being in public because they knew infected or risky people were separated out). If legislators implemented very tight controls over who could use the data (and how) and there was (sufficiently) transparent and rigorous auditing, we could save lives, jobs, and businesses. I know the public won't go for it because the public justifiably doesn't trust the government to prevent abuse of this system, but I would love to live in a world where we could develop and deploy technical solutions to major problems and be confident that the technical solution would not be abused. [0] https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/wlulr/vol72/iss3/4/ https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/wlulr/vol72/iss3/4/ [1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/698/transcript https://www.thisamericanlife.org/698/transcript