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> This makes the work of law enforcement and the judiciary more challenging, as they seek to obtain lawful access to evidence. And the ever growing surveillanc

> This makes the work of law enforcement and the judiciary more challenging, as they seek to obtain lawful access to evidence. And the ever growing surveillance permeating our society makes it less challenging, but they're not asking for reduced authority to compensate for that, are they?

Spivak 6y ago
Why are you assuming that policing is a video game where difficulty needs to be balanced? “Hey sex-traffickers that know what they’re doing are telling all their people to switch to Signal. Since basically our only tools to connect people are phone location history, call logs, text messages, and maybe surveillance footage if we’re lucky, we’re hitting a massive brick wall in every investigation. Help?” Like go listen to or watch some true crime podcasts and documentaries and see just how little police have at their disposal.
- rbecker 6y ago
  > Why are you assuming that policing is a video game where difficulty needs to be balanced? But that's their argument. "Give up your rights because policing is getting harder", while staying quiet when policing gets easier. If policing, on the whole, isn't actually getting harder, their argument is invalid. Look at your own example. Despite encryption, the police would still get a graph of connections (even without knowing the message contents), and since surveillance is so massively easier now, they could: 1) Monitor everyone involved, leading them to incriminating locations (surveillance cameras, drones, tracking devices, hidden microphones, facial recognition applied to pictures people post publicly...) 2) Plant targeted (as opposed to population-wide) backdoors on their devices, circumventing encryption 3) Watch them enter passwords on their devices with telescopic lenses What you call a brick wall is barely a wet paper bag. We should not have to give up our rights and allow mass surveillance of all communication just because police are unwilling to use the targeted tools.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    Aren't we talking about the ability to break into specific devices like the phone or laptop of a deceased victim or a non-cooperative suspect? I'm not talking about dragnet surveillance at all here. If you can come up with a system where it's possible to break into any device without having the ability to break into every device I'm all ears.
    - rbecker 6y ago
      It sounds like we agree on the problem. If you require backdoors on devices/software, that can circumvent encryption in bulk, without the relatively expensive and time-consuming steps of physically planting bugs or similar on specific targets, it will inevitably be used for dragnet surveillance. At least that's what happened almost every time so far.

Spivak 6y ago

Why are you assuming that policing is a video game where difficulty needs to be balanced? “Hey sex-traffickers that know what they’re doing are telling all their people to switch to Signal. Since basically our only tools to connect people are phone location history, call logs, text messages, and maybe surveillance footage if we’re lucky, we’re hitting a massive brick wall in every investigation. Help?” Like go listen to or watch some true crime podcasts and documentaries and see just how little police have at their disposal.

rbecker 6y ago
> Why are you assuming that policing is a video game where difficulty needs to be balanced? But that's their argument. "Give up your rights because policing is getting harder", while staying quiet when policing gets easier. If policing, on the whole, isn't actually getting harder, their argument is invalid. Look at your own example. Despite encryption, the police would still get a graph of connections (even without knowing the message contents), and since surveillance is so massively easier now, they could: 1) Monitor everyone involved, leading them to incriminating locations (surveillance cameras, drones, tracking devices, hidden microphones, facial recognition applied to pictures people post publicly...) 2) Plant targeted (as opposed to population-wide) backdoors on their devices, circumventing encryption 3) Watch them enter passwords on their devices with telescopic lenses What you call a brick wall is barely a wet paper bag. We should not have to give up our rights and allow mass surveillance of all communication just because police are unwilling to use the targeted tools.
- Spivak 6y ago
  Aren't we talking about the ability to break into specific devices like the phone or laptop of a deceased victim or a non-cooperative suspect? I'm not talking about dragnet surveillance at all here. If you can come up with a system where it's possible to break into any device without having the ability to break into every device I'm all ears.
  - rbecker 6y ago
    It sounds like we agree on the problem. If you require backdoors on devices/software, that can circumvent encryption in bulk, without the relatively expensive and time-consuming steps of physically planting bugs or similar on specific targets, it will inevitably be used for dragnet surveillance. At least that's what happened almost every time so far.