8 ms·

Another argument against the "going dark" claim is that before smartphones and the internet, the only conversations the FBI could monitor was through phonelines

by cm2187 6y ago

Another argument against the "going dark" claim is that before smartphones and the internet, the only conversations the FBI could monitor was through phonelines and mail. These were known to be easily monitored and I doubt there was much more criminal activity happening through those then than now. I would argue that the conversations that have gone online are the interactions that were previously happening in-person (at least in term of criminal activity), to which the FBI didn't have access before. There is something Orwellian with the idea that there shouldn't be a word that can be pronounced in the country that the government cannot record and listen to after the fact. The limits of what is legal or not have always moved (see homosexuality, drug and alcohol consumption, etc). So a 100% enforcement of the law is counter-intuitively undesirable.

_wldu 6y ago
15 years ago, if I had said that society would build a tracking system and that most people would happily carry a tracker in their pocket and pay monthly fees to support the tracking networks, I would have been laughed out of the room. But that is what happened, and most people are oblivious to this fact.
- poink 6y ago
  I don't think, "Most people are oblivious," they just don't care and/or don't understand the implications. The idea that the government can use your mobile phone to spy on you is so widely understood that even the dumbest popcorn movies make sure to show fugitives ditching their phones and criminals collecting/discarding them before they discuss business without explaining why. Everybody understands the purpose of a "burner" phone.
  - _wldu 6y ago
    Yes, most everyone knows that they can be tracked. The point is that we voluntarily paid/pay to build and maintain the tracking infrastructure. That's what most people don't realize.
  - tw04 6y ago
    >I don't think, "Most people are oblivious," they just don't care and/or don't understand the implications. But they do, that's what's baffling. The number of people I have heard parrot the "Bill Gates put a tracking chip in the vaccine" has me both baffled and worried. These are people who appear to be otherwise completely sane and mostly rational. When I've pointed out that's literally what their phone does, so why would Bill Gates waste any money putting something in a vaccine (ignoring that's not even physically possible) - I get a "well that's different". They are concerned, but as a non-technical person for some reason they just can't quite wrap their heads around what is happening.
    - mbg721 6y ago
      They can, but they wish it weren't true. Cell phones have an obvious huge upside, and society has adjusted itself so that you pretty much have to have one. (Ever asked to use somebody's phone?). Meanwhile, one of these technocrats is pushing a vaccine that might as well be magic, developed in an unusually short time, to cure a disease that people think might occasionally kill somebody else, but probably not them. The response makes complete sense.
      - clankyclanker 6y ago
        Would it not lead to a horrifying dystopia, it wold be interesting to see how the response changed it the vaccine were marketed as a status symbol.
        jfengel 6y ago
        It is notable that vaccine acceptance has gone up now that it is widely available, which also coincides with the departure of an influential politician who had been downplaying the significance of the disease. It's hard to disentangle the two effects, but there is a burgeoning symbol of status in people literally displaying their vaccine cards. It hasn't completely undone the damage, but it does seem to ameliorate it.
    - brokenmachine 6y ago
- christophilus 6y ago
  I watched Citizen of the State recently, and the paranoid old man in that movie looks like a normie today.
  - ISL 6y ago
    I think you mean Enemy of the State? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film)
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      >> Citizen of the State > I think you mean Enemy of the State? Given the topic of mass surveillance, this doesn't sound like much of a distinction...
- bzzzt 6y ago
  I don't know if people are oblivious - it's just that there are a lot of perceived benefits for the user of the 'tracking device'. Tracking people is a byproduct of all the services a modern phone offers (due to technical or monetization reasons).
- fsflover 6y ago
  Most people simply have no choice unless you are willing to switch to GNU/Linux phones. Those are not 100% ready for everything yet.
  - mannerheim 6y ago
    Not a silver bullet unless you never let your phone talk to a cell tower - in which case it stops being a phone and starts being a miniature tablet.
    - fsflover 6y ago
      At least with Librem 5 you can use the hardware kill switch whenever you need privacy.
  - grishka 6y ago
    It doesn't matter what your phone runs. As long as it's communicating with the network, the carrier knows its location.
    - fsflover 6y ago
      Cell towers is far from the only tracking possibility.
      - grishka 6y ago
        Yes but it's the only one that's a requirement if you want to actually use your phone.
- snarf21 6y ago
  "Hey wiretap, can bunnies eat pancakes?"
- api 6y ago
  Those devices have addictive properties, especially casual mobile games and social media. In the past addictive properties were enough to get people to do absurd things like roll up leaves, light them on fire, and deliberately huff the smoke. That's arguably more harmful than what mobile devices do to us.
- mFixman 6y ago
  15 years ago was 2006. Almost every adult carried a cellphone everywhere back then.
  - maerF0x0 6y ago
    I certainly didn't. But will concede I was definitely a late adopter.
    - DerekL 6y ago
      It was 66%. Most adults, but less than “almost every”. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  15 years ago people did carry a tracker on their pocket already.
lbblack 6y ago
I find it extremely alarming that law enforcement almost everywhere around the world is attempting to undermine almost a century-fold of legitimate mathematics and science with regards to encryption and cryptography. It's a tad embarrassing that lawmakers (who aren't even computer scientists like c'mon are we for real here?) somehow forgot how and who broke the Enigma Machine. Alan Turing did that. Same thing with the Tor browser developed by the US Navy. Either everyone has access to a tool which can guarantee that you can blend in with the rest of the crowd, or every civilian has a special color and we all pop out while the lawmakers and police are somehow wearing grey. How did cypherpunks and computer scientists get blasted from the government like this? Shouldn't there be some laws regarding digital privacy for US citizens? Somehow AD revenue is caked everywhere but I can't use a computer without the FBI wanting my social security card? What the duck. Shucks I thought this was America.
- laurent92 6y ago
  We need to make it strategic to hide our communications. The day the CIA decides that [place any enemy] has routers all over the place in US territory and that their spying is bad, they will mandate the use of Tor instead of discouraging it. We don’t need to be at war, but we need a capable enemy.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
    I heard the balance of power argument before and, well, you were already granted this wish ( and I would argue that you had it granted twice ). Both China and Russia are very capable adversaries at this time and US is slipping from its top dog position. It is genuinely sad to watch.
    - throwaway53453 6y ago
      Russia isn't a threat to the US. Foreign policy maybe, but not existential like China.
      - drummojg 6y ago
scruffyherder 6y ago
I’ll take 15kg of pastrami for the Miami delivery. I’m getting a pushback on the new price on Genoa but Eddie tells me he knows he can smooth it over. The dates however are spoiled,it’s going to need a total clean. I am the walrus.
- fishmaster 6y ago
  The chihuahua flies at noon.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Metadata --- who you talk to and when, is both easier to code and often provides more useful information than message contents. See Lasswell. "Who (says) What (to) Whom (in) What Channel (with) What Effect". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasswell%27s_model_of_communication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasswell%27s_model_of_communic...
loceng 6y ago
Indeed, the internet amplified and accelerate everything - but as we've seen, arguably the largest harm that can come is through mass manipulation via public propaganda that's promoted - and that's not encrypted. It's arguably different industrial complexes that have lead to mass surveillance, perhaps mostly the military-security industrial complex, that has lead to the current path; fear as a distraction from what's really needed is healing and strengthening the individual to not be brittle and prone to manipulation.
jtbayly 6y ago
But mail and phone were essentially the only methods of long-distance communication. The new methods of long-distance instant communication are not just groundbreaking for organizing legal business. Something really has fundamentally changed with the introduction of instant encrypted messages. I'm for that change, and against the government attempting to ban it.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  it's not like you can't implement encrypted comms over mail and phone in the first place. people with a strong enough incentive (and nerds) have been using symmetric encryption for a long time. what has changed is, like you say, how trivially easy it is to send instant encrypted messages. what was once the domain of spy agencies and organized crime is now practical for my mom to ask me what I would like for dinner. one wonders why the FBI finds that so concerning.
alkonaut 6y ago
> I would argue that the conversations that have gone online are the interactions that were previously happening in-person (at least in term of criminal activity), to which the FBI didn't have access before. Indeed. But those conversations/meetings were visible, risky etc. They were thus possible to monitor/attack and they weren't scalable. From the perspective of law enforcement, criminals being able to discuss crimes or make payments without there being a phyiscal exchange is a nightmare. In the past, they could monitor meetings between criminals. Now they basically need to look over the shoulder of criminals in order to prove that CriminalA spoke to CriminalB. It must be extremely difficult.
- sneak 6y ago
  Nah, they just need to issue a wiretap order to the encrypted messenger app's centralized servers. Even end to end encrypted systems know who is talking to who, and how often, and where those two parties are (due to client IP geolocation).
  - tremon 6y ago
    Not really, even at my work we have (well, had) regular swap-meets for supermarket discount trackers. So one week I would shop as badge #1, the next week I would be badge #2. Just knowing the identity of the person who was issued the account doesn't give you any information about who's using it now. In aggregate, you would still be able to identify which group of people used which endpoints, but aggregate information won't hold up in court. Yes, geolocation would solve that, but I would expect such people to absolutely disable the GPS, so you'd need to rely on cell tower pings, which are not found on the same servers.
  - mannerheim 6y ago
    With a decentralised protocol + Tor that sort of metadata could be either unavailable or extremely difficult to ascertain.
snarf21 6y ago
Yeah, these things are scary. My test for people who ask for these backdoors is to ask for them to hand me their unlocked mobile. I promise to not share any information I read/see. There is an expression in this area that I love (but I can't remember the exact phrase): If you follow anyone around for some small period of time, you will find them guilty of breaking the law.
- Jabbermonkey 6y ago
  "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." - Cardinal Richelieu (disputed)
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
    I don't think that is quite comparable to now. Back in France at the time of Richelieu, there wasn't a concept of free speech or religious freedom. Thus if you said that you thought the king was an idiot, you could be hanged. Or you doubted the Church, or doubted God existed. Remember, blasphemy could be punished by death at that time. Nowadays, in most free democracies you are free to say you don't believe in religion, or think the leaders are idiots and there are minimal consequences.
hertzrat 6y ago
Anybody serious about this issue should contact their representatives to let them know it’s a concern.
rtkwe 6y ago
> Another argument against the "going dark" claim is that before smartphones and the internet, the only conversations the FBI could monitor was through phonelines and mail. These were known to be easily monitored and I doubt there was much more criminal activity happening through those then than now. It doesn't really matter that they quantitatively have access to more to them, from the POV of law enforcement though they had access to everything that was available if they wanted it then and they don't now. Law enforcement chafes and pushes against any attempt to limit them because their self image is that of protectors and good guys so what they do has good reason even if people don't want them to, it's a whole self justifying greater good/ends justify the means self justifying loop a lot of place fall into, including tech companies. You see it constantly with unjustified searches, stops and seizures, given a limit, eg the requirement for probable cause for a search, police find any way around it they can to justify the action they already want to take, eg smell of drugs or 'acting suspicious'. There are definitely crimes that go unsolved because police can't monitor everything 24/7, that irritates a group tasked with 'protecting' society so they push back. We feel the same thing in software engineering to a certain extent, governance, architectural approval, etc all suck to work with but they exist for a reason in big orgs but just because they're useful agencies doesn't mean they suck less when you're held up because the architects take 3 months to approve something and want 20 Powerpoint decks to do it.
rubyfan 6y ago
> The limits of what is legal or not have always moved (see homosexuality, drug and alcohol consumption, etc). So a 100% enforcement of the law is counter-intuitively undesirable. This is perhaps one of the more simple and persuasive arguments against domestic surveillance and spying that I’ve heard.

by cm2187 6y ago

_wldu 6y ago

15 years ago, if I had said that society would build a tracking system and that most people would happily carry a tracker in their pocket and pay monthly fees to support the tracking networks, I would have been laughed out of the room. But that is what happened, and most people are oblivious to this fact.

poink 6y ago
I don't think, "Most people are oblivious," they just don't care and/or don't understand the implications. The idea that the government can use your mobile phone to spy on you is so widely understood that even the dumbest popcorn movies make sure to show fugitives ditching their phones and criminals collecting/discarding them before they discuss business without explaining why. Everybody understands the purpose of a "burner" phone.
- _wldu 6y ago
  Yes, most everyone knows that they can be tracked. The point is that we voluntarily paid/pay to build and maintain the tracking infrastructure. That's what most people don't realize.
- tw04 6y ago
  >I don't think, "Most people are oblivious," they just don't care and/or don't understand the implications. But they do, that's what's baffling. The number of people I have heard parrot the "Bill Gates put a tracking chip in the vaccine" has me both baffled and worried. These are people who appear to be otherwise completely sane and mostly rational. When I've pointed out that's literally what their phone does, so why would Bill Gates waste any money putting something in a vaccine (ignoring that's not even physically possible) - I get a "well that's different". They are concerned, but as a non-technical person for some reason they just can't quite wrap their heads around what is happening.
  - mbg721 6y ago
    They can, but they wish it weren't true. Cell phones have an obvious huge upside, and society has adjusted itself so that you pretty much have to have one. (Ever asked to use somebody's phone?). Meanwhile, one of these technocrats is pushing a vaccine that might as well be magic, developed in an unusually short time, to cure a disease that people think might occasionally kill somebody else, but probably not them. The response makes complete sense.
    - clankyclanker 6y ago
      Would it not lead to a horrifying dystopia, it wold be interesting to see how the response changed it the vaccine were marketed as a status symbol.
      - jfengel 6y ago
        It is notable that vaccine acceptance has gone up now that it is widely available, which also coincides with the departure of an influential politician who had been downplaying the significance of the disease. It's hard to disentangle the two effects, but there is a burgeoning symbol of status in people literally displaying their vaccine cards. It hasn't completely undone the damage, but it does seem to ameliorate it.
  - brokenmachine 6y ago
christophilus 6y ago
I watched Citizen of the State recently, and the paranoid old man in that movie looks like a normie today.
- ISL 6y ago
  I think you mean Enemy of the State? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film)
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    >> Citizen of the State > I think you mean Enemy of the State? Given the topic of mass surveillance, this doesn't sound like much of a distinction...
bzzzt 6y ago
I don't know if people are oblivious - it's just that there are a lot of perceived benefits for the user of the 'tracking device'. Tracking people is a byproduct of all the services a modern phone offers (due to technical or monetization reasons).
fsflover 6y ago
Most people simply have no choice unless you are willing to switch to GNU/Linux phones. Those are not 100% ready for everything yet.
- mannerheim 6y ago
  Not a silver bullet unless you never let your phone talk to a cell tower - in which case it stops being a phone and starts being a miniature tablet.
  - fsflover 6y ago
    At least with Librem 5 you can use the hardware kill switch whenever you need privacy.
- grishka 6y ago
  It doesn't matter what your phone runs. As long as it's communicating with the network, the carrier knows its location.
  - fsflover 6y ago
    Cell towers is far from the only tracking possibility.
    - grishka 6y ago
      Yes but it's the only one that's a requirement if you want to actually use your phone.
snarf21 6y ago
"Hey wiretap, can bunnies eat pancakes?"
api 6y ago
Those devices have addictive properties, especially casual mobile games and social media. In the past addictive properties were enough to get people to do absurd things like roll up leaves, light them on fire, and deliberately huff the smoke. That's arguably more harmful than what mobile devices do to us.
mFixman 6y ago
15 years ago was 2006. Almost every adult carried a cellphone everywhere back then.
- maerF0x0 6y ago
  I certainly didn't. But will concede I was definitely a late adopter.
  - DerekL 6y ago
    It was 66%. Most adults, but less than “almost every”. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/
marcosdumay 6y ago
15 years ago people did carry a tracker on their pocket already.

lbblack 6y ago

I find it extremely alarming that law enforcement almost everywhere around the world is attempting to undermine almost a century-fold of legitimate mathematics and science with regards to encryption and cryptography. It's a tad embarrassing that lawmakers (who aren't even computer scientists like c'mon are we for real here?) somehow forgot how and who broke the Enigma Machine. Alan Turing did that. Same thing with the Tor browser developed by the US Navy. Either everyone has access to a tool which can guarantee that you can blend in with the rest of the crowd, or every civilian has a special color and we all pop out while the lawmakers and police are somehow wearing grey. How did cypherpunks and computer scientists get blasted from the government like this? Shouldn't there be some laws regarding digital privacy for US citizens? Somehow AD revenue is caked everywhere but I can't use a computer without the FBI wanting my social security card? What the duck. Shucks I thought this was America.

laurent92 6y ago
We need to make it strategic to hide our communications. The day the CIA decides that [place any enemy] has routers all over the place in US territory and that their spying is bad, they will mandate the use of Tor instead of discouraging it. We don’t need to be at war, but we need a capable enemy.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
  I heard the balance of power argument before and, well, you were already granted this wish ( and I would argue that you had it granted twice ). Both China and Russia are very capable adversaries at this time and US is slipping from its top dog position. It is genuinely sad to watch.
  - throwaway53453 6y ago
    Russia isn't a threat to the US. Foreign policy maybe, but not existential like China.
    - drummojg 6y ago

scruffyherder 6y ago

I’ll take 15kg of pastrami for the Miami delivery. I’m getting a pushback on the new price on Genoa but Eddie tells me he knows he can smooth it over. The dates however are spoiled,it’s going to need a total clean. I am the walrus.

fishmaster 6y ago
The chihuahua flies at noon.
dredmorbius 6y ago
Metadata --- who you talk to and when, is both easier to code and often provides more useful information than message contents. See Lasswell. "Who (says) What (to) Whom (in) What Channel (with) What Effect". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasswell%27s_model_of_communication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasswell%27s_model_of_communic...

loceng 6y ago

Indeed, the internet amplified and accelerate everything - but as we've seen, arguably the largest harm that can come is through mass manipulation via public propaganda that's promoted - and that's not encrypted. It's arguably different industrial complexes that have lead to mass surveillance, perhaps mostly the military-security industrial complex, that has lead to the current path; fear as a distraction from what's really needed is healing and strengthening the individual to not be brittle and prone to manipulation.

jtbayly 6y ago

But mail and phone were essentially the only methods of long-distance communication. The new methods of long-distance instant communication are not just groundbreaking for organizing legal business. Something really has fundamentally changed with the introduction of instant encrypted messages. I'm for that change, and against the government attempting to ban it.

leetcrew 6y ago
it's not like you can't implement encrypted comms over mail and phone in the first place. people with a strong enough incentive (and nerds) have been using symmetric encryption for a long time. what has changed is, like you say, how trivially easy it is to send instant encrypted messages. what was once the domain of spy agencies and organized crime is now practical for my mom to ask me what I would like for dinner. one wonders why the FBI finds that so concerning.

alkonaut 6y ago

> I would argue that the conversations that have gone online are the interactions that were previously happening in-person (at least in term of criminal activity), to which the FBI didn't have access before. Indeed. But those conversations/meetings were visible, risky etc. They were thus possible to monitor/attack and they weren't scalable. From the perspective of law enforcement, criminals being able to discuss crimes or make payments without there being a phyiscal exchange is a nightmare. In the past, they could monitor meetings between criminals. Now they basically need to look over the shoulder of criminals in order to prove that CriminalA spoke to CriminalB. It must be extremely difficult.

sneak 6y ago
Nah, they just need to issue a wiretap order to the encrypted messenger app's centralized servers. Even end to end encrypted systems know who is talking to who, and how often, and where those two parties are (due to client IP geolocation).
- tremon 6y ago
  Not really, even at my work we have (well, had) regular swap-meets for supermarket discount trackers. So one week I would shop as badge #1, the next week I would be badge #2. Just knowing the identity of the person who was issued the account doesn't give you any information about who's using it now. In aggregate, you would still be able to identify which group of people used which endpoints, but aggregate information won't hold up in court. Yes, geolocation would solve that, but I would expect such people to absolutely disable the GPS, so you'd need to rely on cell tower pings, which are not found on the same servers.
- mannerheim 6y ago
  With a decentralised protocol + Tor that sort of metadata could be either unavailable or extremely difficult to ascertain.

snarf21 6y ago

Yeah, these things are scary. My test for people who ask for these backdoors is to ask for them to hand me their unlocked mobile. I promise to not share any information I read/see. There is an expression in this area that I love (but I can't remember the exact phrase): If you follow anyone around for some small period of time, you will find them guilty of breaking the law.

Jabbermonkey 6y ago
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." - Cardinal Richelieu (disputed)
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  I don't think that is quite comparable to now. Back in France at the time of Richelieu, there wasn't a concept of free speech or religious freedom. Thus if you said that you thought the king was an idiot, you could be hanged. Or you doubted the Church, or doubted God existed. Remember, blasphemy could be punished by death at that time. Nowadays, in most free democracies you are free to say you don't believe in religion, or think the leaders are idiots and there are minimal consequences.

hertzrat 6y ago

Anybody serious about this issue should contact their representatives to let them know it’s a concern.

rtkwe 6y ago

> Another argument against the "going dark" claim is that before smartphones and the internet, the only conversations the FBI could monitor was through phonelines and mail. These were known to be easily monitored and I doubt there was much more criminal activity happening through those then than now. It doesn't really matter that they quantitatively have access to more to them, from the POV of law enforcement though they had access to everything that was available if they wanted it then and they don't now. Law enforcement chafes and pushes against any attempt to limit them because their self image is that of protectors and good guys so what they do has good reason even if people don't want them to, it's a whole self justifying greater good/ends justify the means self justifying loop a lot of place fall into, including tech companies. You see it constantly with unjustified searches, stops and seizures, given a limit, eg the requirement for probable cause for a search, police find any way around it they can to justify the action they already want to take, eg smell of drugs or 'acting suspicious'. There are definitely crimes that go unsolved because police can't monitor everything 24/7, that irritates a group tasked with 'protecting' society so they push back. We feel the same thing in software engineering to a certain extent, governance, architectural approval, etc all suck to work with but they exist for a reason in big orgs but just because they're useful agencies doesn't mean they suck less when you're held up because the architects take 3 months to approve something and want 20 Powerpoint decks to do it.

rubyfan 6y ago

> The limits of what is legal or not have always moved (see homosexuality, drug and alcohol consumption, etc). So a 100% enforcement of the law is counter-intuitively undesirable. This is perhaps one of the more simple and persuasive arguments against domestic surveillance and spying that I’ve heard.