5 ms·

The police have the right with suitable warrant to break a lock and breach a wall if necessary

• IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
  "the police have the right" I suppose it depends on how your constitution is written ?
  • hutzlibu 3y ago
    I don't know any constitution or law that forbids the police from entering peoples home if there was a serious crime. (A warrant Btw. landlords also may do this under special circumstances, as well as a firemen. But the default is, that your home is sacred and the doors my not breached. Just as the default for communication should be, that it is private. If there is a suspect, the police may hack their computers with a warrant, but they may not hack all of our computers(by implementing backdoors), because it is more comfortable for them.
• johngladtj 3y ago
  A wall, not every wall.
  • brabel 3y ago
    So if technology made it possible to "unlock" only a single encrypted connection from a particular suspect, then it would be fine? Because such technology is actually feasible if you accept that the police will never use that to unlock someone's connections without a judicial order (like we seem to assume is the case when the police raids a "wall" or home). That can be enforced by having a system that requires a judge's private key to sign a digital warrant which can the only be used to "unlock" a particular encrypted channel. The judge's private keys would become extremely valuable of course, making the judges high level target: though I suspect they already are.
    • _heimdall 3y ago
      I don't think many would complain if there was a truly secure way to allow decryption of a single person's communication after the fact. The problem is partly that end users have no way of knowing when their communication has been decrypted. I know if the cops kicked my door in, I don't know if they're watching my messages with or without a warrant.
      • seanw444 3y ago
        Thank God there isn't. My own government scares me more than random hackers do.
    • naasking 3y ago
      > The judge's private keys would become extremely valuable of course, making the judges high level target: though I suspect they already are. This is the real problem. This introduces a global vulnerability that isn't analogous to anything physical, like breaking down walls. There are almost 50,000 judges in the USA alone. Breaking into any one of their offices or houses, or bribing them, could grant you access to every phone or computer on the planet. A local magistrate doesn't have the authority to issue a warrant to break down every door in the USA, nor would the local police be able to execute such an order even if it could be issued. There are matters of scale here that are novel.
• _trampeltier 3y ago
  Suitable .. they just come with a warrant of bullshit. Thats enough.
• cbeach 3y ago
  It's visible and rare, when government breaks down the door of your physical home. These awful new laws make it invisible and routine for the government to break down the door to your digital home.
• solarkraft 3y ago
  As much as I like privacy and e2ee, this is an important point. If there were locks or walls that are entirely impenetrable, would people be disallowed to possess or use them? I probably wouldn't like it, but it seems less crazy than some people make it out to be. In practice the analogy doesn't hold up of course, since it's costly and noticeable for cops to raid a house but cheap and easy for the government to spy on everyone (and we know how eager they are to do it).
  • M3L0NM4N 3y ago
    Why is communication being compared to physical access? E2EE protects my conversations from being "heard" by others. If I was walking at the park talking to my friend, the government wouldn't complain that there's not a microphone nearby. Nobody else is physically able to listen to that conversation, and that's perfectly common and acceptable.
    • sensanaty 3y ago
      I know it's cliche to bring up 1984 in these kind of talks, but your comment reminded me immediately of that section in the book where Winston goes to that park in order to be away from prying eyes and ears (If I'm remembering it correctly, it's been ages since I've read it).
      • simbolit 3y ago
        Winston and Julia go out into the countryside, they each take different trains, then meet at a pre-arranged location in the middle of nowhere, and then go out into the literal woods, to talk (and have sex), and they are still paranoid under every second branch there might be a microphone.
    • Almondsetat 3y ago
      Nobody owns the air around you, whereas the cables and routers and switches your communication propagates through are owned by private corporations and by the state
• kitd 3y ago
  A specific lock and a specific wall. They don't have the right to require all locks and walls to be built with fundamental flaws so they can be broken with the tap of a hammer.
  • Brian_K_White 3y ago
    Except for TSA locks on luggage at the airport. Which are pure placebo pretend locks that don't lock anything from anyone.
  • emblaegh 3y ago
    If indestructible walls were feasible you bet they'd ban it.
    • WJW 3y ago
      It's useless to get into an escalatory war with the government. Even if you could get an indestructible wall they can just cut off water and power, then siege your home until you come out to get food or something like that.
      • mcv 3y ago
        And they can also arrest or interrogate you without reading your encrypted message. There are plenty of ways to investigate crime that doesn't rely on breaking walls or encryption.
    • hackeraccount 3y ago
      These aren't indestructible wall though. Encryption schemes used by real people in the real world are never implemented and used flawlessly. The question isn't if you can get at conversation between two law abiding people or two pedophiles - in both cases you can if you through sufficient resources at it. The question is - what's sufficient? My concern is that if you connive to make it a trivial amount of effort the temptation for Government will be to listen in on every conversation to lessen the chance of missing an important one. Further the more trivial you make it for the Government the better the chance that the not-Government will be able to listen in on any as well. If on the other hand the effort is non-trivial then the Government will need to carefully consider where to put it's effort. Obviously there's a greater chance that the effort will be misapplied and the two pedophiles will have the freedom to plot or whatever but that tends to worry me less. Note I'm an American. People run around shooting each other regularly here and I still don't think telling people they can't own a gun is a good idea so I'd take what I say with a grain of salt.
• tpm 3y ago
  The police have the right with suitable warrant to break any encryption.
• BLKNSLVR 3y ago
  The police also have all kinds of allowances that aren't afforded to regular citizenry to surveil and pry and monitor and track behaviour and map social contacts and plant listening devices and watching devices and almost any other flavour of surveillance they can get a judge to sign-off. The problem with all of the above is that it takes human effort, which is costly. We've all seen the Pandoras Box that the likes of Google and Facebook have opened on automated behavioural decision making. Police want that, their quotas and their budgets neeeeeeeeeeeed iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitttt like Renton needs that one last hit. Outsource our decisions to 'the infallible machine' so that we can answer "computer says no". No culpability, no responsibility, even less need to apply our x million-years-in-the-making built-in logic engines that once (maybe?) were directed and trained in how to be applied to the job of policing in order to better serve the public. Policing is meant to be difficult, because getting it wrong has great potential to completely fuck people's lives. If they can't "prove it" without access to the last morsel of individual privacy afforded by E2EE, then it's likely there's nothing to prove. Earn it you lazy fucks. Edited to add: A little bit of retrospective guilt in the offensively opinionated ending above, but I'm going to make it a bit worse and spread it a bit wider. It's politicians calling for this because it seems to "play in the electorate". So "earn it you lazy fucks" is directed at all the lazy fucks in the chain from ideas man to lobbyist to number-cruncher to adviser to political mouthpiece to sponsor of legislation to partisan supporters of the bill and even to the somewhat victims as the enforcers of bad legislation. An entire chain in which none of whom seem to have an understanding of the context of what they're promoting outside of "how it plays" or "this says you're doing illegal". Fuck them all out of an airlock.
  • bloqs 3y ago
    Not at all, great comment