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This is nonsense. It's perfectly consistent to think that law enforcement is willing to cheat when they can get away with it, but that other domestic forces ar

This is nonsense. It's perfectly consistent to think that law enforcement is willing to cheat when they can get away with it, but that other domestic forces are capable of holding them accountable for that. Further, it strawmans the position: they do think that law enforcement cares about the law, just not so much as catching lawbreakers who aren't part of the political or policing class, and is willing to cheat the law in order to "fulfill the deeper mission", or some ascribed view like that. A natural reply to thinking that law enforcement will cheat if it can is to think that other large, entrenched players must force law-enforcement to disclose its actions for review before lending their power to law enforcement goals - which is exactly the stance in insisting that Google not respond to hashed lists, and instead demand to see the files that they're supposed to be blocking. It increases the number of players necessary to cheat successfully, and hence removes some of the incentive of law enforcement to cheat.

tptacek 12y ago
Your comment would be stronger without the first sentence, but glass houses, stones, &c. Since the rest of it was a good-faith response to my question: I'm not sure I understand how it's consistent to believe that law enforcement (to be precise: "LEOs and domestic intelligence") are inclined to ignore the law entirely, and believe that there's accountability. If there was accountability, they could not easily incline towards ignoring the law, because doing that would have consequences. Belief in the former condition seems to equate to disbelief of the latter. I don't think I responded to a straw man argument. I think you rehabilitated a broken argument and then supposed that I was responding to that better argument instead of the one that was actually posed.

tptacek 12y ago

Your comment would be stronger without the first sentence, but glass houses, stones, &c. Since the rest of it was a good-faith response to my question: I'm not sure I understand how it's consistent to believe that law enforcement (to be precise: "LEOs and domestic intelligence") are inclined to ignore the law entirely, and believe that there's accountability. If there was accountability, they could not easily incline towards ignoring the law, because doing that would have consequences. Belief in the former condition seems to equate to disbelief of the latter. I don't think I responded to a straw man argument. I think you rehabilitated a broken argument and then supposed that I was responding to that better argument instead of the one that was actually posed.