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It's a trade-off. Of course I want to preserve my privacy. But I get it that law enforcement wants to be able to look into communications. Let's say they find

It's a trade-off. Of course I want to preserve my privacy. But I get it that law enforcement wants to be able to look into communications. Let's say they find a terrorist (I'm close to Brussels, so not a hypothetical scenario here). Best case you want to see which phones they have, and look into all their communication to get an idea about their contacts etc. It's a very hard problem, and I'm not sure which one I would pick.

chokeartist 6y ago
You're overthinking terrorism investigations. They don't need to be able to defeat crypto. They just need to be able to threaten Muhammad or whomever with 20 years in the clink. Everyone rolls under that pressure. No one is "hard".
koonsolo 6y ago
Oof, a lot of downvotes. Can you please explain why it's not a tradeoff, or what else I said wrong?
- kemonocode 6y ago
  People are probably considering what you said an appeal to emotion, "Think of the terrorists!" being up there with "Think of the children!" in terms of excuses for misguided policies. Governments already have plenty of tools to track down and deal with terrorists if so they wished: a distressingly amount of planning and radicalization is done over clear text in social media, and even in E2EE there's a wealth of necessarily unencrypted metadata you can make use of.
- tehwebguy 6y ago
  Because there is no trade off, communication is end-to-end encrypted or there is a backdoor.
ceilingcorner 6y ago
Or perhaps you figure out why terrorism exists and work towards preventing it, instead of spying on your population and violating their rights “just in case”?
- koonsolo 6y ago
  I don't believe you can prevent crime with prevention alone.
  - ceilingcorner 6y ago
    Crime? Or terrorism?
    - koonsolo 6y ago
      Both
- fetbaffe 6y ago
  I think that todays terrorism is mainly state sponsored, terrorist organisation use different types of resentment when recruiting new members, however many of the terrorist organisations are funded by governments around the world, this is the modern form of covert warfare in the post cold war era. What we have is that one government, lets call it the States of Merica, funds & trains freedom fighters in a country called Lyria. Sometime after this Lyria is thrown into huge & devastating civil war against the regime where the opposing terrorist forms a new entity, the Salami State. The civil war results in massive refugee crisis. Refugees flees north into the big trade union called Äuropean Club, ÄC. ÄC happens to be allied with States of Merica. Terrorists from the Salami State infiltrates the refugees and travels to ÄC where they commit a horrific terrorist attack in the capital city of Sirap. President of the States of Merica is chocked by these horrible news and pledges to help it's friends in the ÄC. This leads the ÄC to adopt surveillance measures to track any potential terrorist. To its help it uses the knowhow and infrastructure from their close friends States of Merica (obviously). When the civil war in Lyria nears it end and the Salami State is almost defeated, suddenly the winning Lyrian regime commits a gas attack on innocent civilians in a Salami State stronghold. ÄC and States of Merica condemns the gas attack and bombs the Lyrian regime as punishment. The freedom fighters rejoice because they now can fight for freedom a few more years. The Salami State still exists and continue to get help from somewhere, unknown by whom, and commits more terrorist attacks in ÄC, in cities like Ockholm and Womanchester, because ÄC still haven't fixed it's border problem, but coincidentally ÄC has instead developed an excellent surveillance program, which is if course needed when the border is wide opened to the Salami state, duh! All this is of course highly speculative and shares no resemblance with the real world. So yes, if we fix terrorism because of like uh poverty, it can probably be solved.
coldtea 6y ago
>But I get it that law enforcement wants to be able to look into communications. Why?
rakoo 6y ago
Look at the existing cases of terrorism. All of them used unencrypted forms of communication: shared Gmail account, phone calls, even good old SMS. The issue is not that police can't see what those people are doing, none of the perpretators are unknown; it's that they (and the judiciary branch) don't have enough resources to really tackle them.
- koonsolo 6y ago
  I partly agree with you. But right now, it's pretty easy to use end-to-end encrypted forms of communication, so why still use sms? Knowing the suspects and having limited resources, seems to me a argument for listening into communication, not an argument against it.
  - rakoo 6y ago
    I'm not exactly an expert on the issue, but I could imagine that they use sms because that's the only available form of communication on an anonymous $10 dumbphone, and any computer connected to the internet can connect to a webmail. Listening to more communications is exactly a resource problem: it isn't exactly cheap to build and maintain the infrastructure to gather and analyze more. Moreover in the context of the link, while I'm not a fan of conversations being listened on by default, I certainly don't want resources be spent so that encryption can be reduced

chokeartist 6y ago

You're overthinking terrorism investigations. They don't need to be able to defeat crypto. They just need to be able to threaten Muhammad or whomever with 20 years in the clink. Everyone rolls under that pressure. No one is "hard".

koonsolo 6y ago

Oof, a lot of downvotes. Can you please explain why it's not a tradeoff, or what else I said wrong?

kemonocode 6y ago
People are probably considering what you said an appeal to emotion, "Think of the terrorists!" being up there with "Think of the children!" in terms of excuses for misguided policies. Governments already have plenty of tools to track down and deal with terrorists if so they wished: a distressingly amount of planning and radicalization is done over clear text in social media, and even in E2EE there's a wealth of necessarily unencrypted metadata you can make use of.
tehwebguy 6y ago
Because there is no trade off, communication is end-to-end encrypted or there is a backdoor.

ceilingcorner 6y ago

Or perhaps you figure out why terrorism exists and work towards preventing it, instead of spying on your population and violating their rights “just in case”?

koonsolo 6y ago
I don't believe you can prevent crime with prevention alone.
- ceilingcorner 6y ago
  Crime? Or terrorism?
  - koonsolo 6y ago
    Both
fetbaffe 6y ago
I think that todays terrorism is mainly state sponsored, terrorist organisation use different types of resentment when recruiting new members, however many of the terrorist organisations are funded by governments around the world, this is the modern form of covert warfare in the post cold war era. What we have is that one government, lets call it the States of Merica, funds & trains freedom fighters in a country called Lyria. Sometime after this Lyria is thrown into huge & devastating civil war against the regime where the opposing terrorist forms a new entity, the Salami State. The civil war results in massive refugee crisis. Refugees flees north into the big trade union called Äuropean Club, ÄC. ÄC happens to be allied with States of Merica. Terrorists from the Salami State infiltrates the refugees and travels to ÄC where they commit a horrific terrorist attack in the capital city of Sirap. President of the States of Merica is chocked by these horrible news and pledges to help it's friends in the ÄC. This leads the ÄC to adopt surveillance measures to track any potential terrorist. To its help it uses the knowhow and infrastructure from their close friends States of Merica (obviously). When the civil war in Lyria nears it end and the Salami State is almost defeated, suddenly the winning Lyrian regime commits a gas attack on innocent civilians in a Salami State stronghold. ÄC and States of Merica condemns the gas attack and bombs the Lyrian regime as punishment. The freedom fighters rejoice because they now can fight for freedom a few more years. The Salami State still exists and continue to get help from somewhere, unknown by whom, and commits more terrorist attacks in ÄC, in cities like Ockholm and Womanchester, because ÄC still haven't fixed it's border problem, but coincidentally ÄC has instead developed an excellent surveillance program, which is if course needed when the border is wide opened to the Salami state, duh! All this is of course highly speculative and shares no resemblance with the real world. So yes, if we fix terrorism because of like uh poverty, it can probably be solved.

coldtea 6y ago

>But I get it that law enforcement wants to be able to look into communications. Why?

rakoo 6y ago

Look at the existing cases of terrorism. All of them used unencrypted forms of communication: shared Gmail account, phone calls, even good old SMS. The issue is not that police can't see what those people are doing, none of the perpretators are unknown; it's that they (and the judiciary branch) don't have enough resources to really tackle them.

koonsolo 6y ago
I partly agree with you. But right now, it's pretty easy to use end-to-end encrypted forms of communication, so why still use sms? Knowing the suspects and having limited resources, seems to me a argument for listening into communication, not an argument against it.
- rakoo 6y ago
  I'm not exactly an expert on the issue, but I could imagine that they use sms because that's the only available form of communication on an anonymous $10 dumbphone, and any computer connected to the internet can connect to a webmail. Listening to more communications is exactly a resource problem: it isn't exactly cheap to build and maintain the infrastructure to gather and analyze more. Moreover in the context of the link, while I'm not a fan of conversations being listened on by default, I certainly don't want resources be spent so that encryption can be reduced