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The thing is, by building backdoors into the widely used platforms, we gain maybe 10 years of arresting idiot criminals until they learn to use Signal, the same
by m12k 6y ago
The thing is, by building backdoors into the widely used platforms, we gain maybe 10 years of arresting idiot criminals until they learn to use Signal, the same way they learned to use burner phones, but at the same time throw everybody's privacy out the window while opening a huge security hole in our infrastructure. It's just not a good trade-off, not even from a pragmatic, non-idealist perspective.
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoA lot of crime is opportunistic. If people feel they are more likely to get caught then much of it will just go away.
- jchw 6y agoThis claim is weird. “A lot” — well wait, how much is a lot? I tried to look, but a couple cursory searches yielded little in the way of attempts to quantify the amount of “opportunistic crime” versus premeditated. And frankly, going by raw quantity might not be good enough. How much damage are they doing relative to premeditated crime? Shoplifting a candy bar versus a murder, you know. I also wonder if this has much to do with this article. If you are conversing about future criminal activity on Facebook or SMS, can you argue it was not premeditated in some fashion? And even if this makes sense... how much loss of our personal freedoms is it worth to eliminate xx% of crime? (And, is it possible that there are better ways, like perhaps looking at the causes rather than trying to curb the effects...)