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The point that James Comey was trying to make is that we don't want to live in a world without warrants. The prosecution in a criminal case has the burden of pr

The point that James Comey was trying to make is that we don't want to live in a world without warrants. The prosecution in a criminal case has the burden of proof. It's difficult to prove something beyond a reasonable doubt if key evidence is encrypted and cannot be retrieved, even with a lawful warrant. This means that more criminals who are legitimately guilty will walk, which means that all of us will be less safe. The entire system is built around the idea that law enforcement can search and seize evidence if they have a lawful warrant from a duly appointed judge. Unbreakable encryption fundamentally threatens that framework. An example the FBI used is a stupid criminal kidnapping a child and leaving their encrypted phone behind somewhere. Even if the FBI got warrants from multiple respected judges, they couldn't go through that phone to look for clues about where kidnapper may have taken the child. There are ticking bomb scenarios and other time sensitive situations. It's reasonable that the law enforcement should have some ability to access information with approval from the judiciary. We don't want to endanger ourselves in order to protect the banal communications on our cell phones or dissemble our legal system for the sake of keeping our sexting private.

dragonwriter 12y ago
> Even if the FBI got warrants from multiple respected judges, they couldn't go through that phone to look for clues about where kidnapper may have taken the child. Sure they could. They might not be able to practically decrypt it, just as legal warrants wouldn't magically make them able to practically decrypt encrypted notes on paper in the same situation. > The bottom line is that our justice system is based around the idea that a lawful warrant allows law enforcement to search or seize anything that could be useful in a time sensitive investigation. Which encryption doesn't change. However, our legal system is not based around the idea that everyone has a positive obligation to surrender tools to a third party so that anytime law enforcement has a valid warrant to search and seize something, they also have a third-party other than the target they can go to in order to get assistance interpreting what they've seized. The fact that they ever had that ability with phones is simply an accident of the fundamentally broken approach to security taken previously with mobile phones, which also made them vulnerable without a legal warrant. The correction of that vulnerability may inconvenience law enforcement, but it does so in a way consistent with the inconveniences law enforcement has always faced with the hardcopy documents that were the primary form of data that they might seize for most of the time our legal system has existed, not in some way that is somehow novel or inconsistent with the history of our legal system.
pastProlog 12y ago
Are you talking about the same FBI which tried to blackmail Martin Luther King from giving up his campaign for civil rights in the US - many of those rights ones everyone already theoretically had under the US constitution and court decisions? You're talking about entrusting a government organization which has already repeatedly betrayed that trust to not interfere with political affairs in this country. They've already over-extended themselves in terms of what they can investigate, now you want them to have control of everyone's lives so they can't have any privacy if they wish.
vonklaus 12y ago
>The point that James Comey was trying to make is that we don't want to live in a world without warrants. >Sealed court orders and proceedings for google, twitter, apple, dropbox, yahoo. >NSA scandal. I would rather have a few criminals go free (if the only evidence was on their Apple device) than unfettered access to my data. I guess I just enjoy the little bit of freedom I have left.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
guelo 12y ago
If the FBI doesn't have access to our every thought and desire more criminals who are legitimately guilty will walk, which means that all of us will be less safe. Therefore it is reasonable that the law enforcement should have some ability to access our every thought and desire with approval from the judiciary. We don't want to endanger ourselves in order to protect our banal private thoughts or dissemble the legal systems for the sake of keeping our sexual desires private. Also, something about "think about the children!".
PavlovsCat 12y ago
If the ONLY evidence of something is "encrypted information", doesn't that rule out a lot of crimes, including all physical violence? > Even if the FBI got warrants from multiple respected judges, they couldn't go through that phone to look for clues about where kidnapper may have taken the child. Yeah, and the same goes for when the kidnapper isn't dumb, or doesn't leave their phone behind. Sometimes it's tough. But that doesn't warrant everything. > We don't want to endanger ourselves in order to protect the banal communications on our cell phones or dissemble our legal system for the sake of keeping our sexting private. What you call banals is not banal to me, not at all. I would even say hundreds of millions of people having no expectation of privacy is a much bigger issue than all unsolved crimes in the US put together. And then there are past episodes like COINTELPRO, are there not. I would say that unbreakable encryption, combined with other things of course, makes a lot more impossible than just catching petty criminals via them making silly mistakes. It is also one sandbag against tyranny, and that is also a ticking bomb scenario. That bomb is far from being defused.
- boomlinde 12y ago
  You are dissembling the legal system by not at least occasionally leaving your phone behind.
- csandreasen 12y ago
  > If the ONLY evidence of something is "encrypted information", doesn't that rule out a lot of crimes, including all physical violence? All but one of the examples that FBI Director James Comey gave in his speech at the Brookings Institute yesterday[1] were violent crimes (and you could argue that the drug bust was related to violent crime since he said that the group was also linked to homicides and robberies). The last example he gave showed that evidence taken from cell phones has been used to exonerate suspects as well. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkbh5fJoFhc#t=2313 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkbh5fJoFhc#t=2313 (should automatically jump, but if not it starts at 38:33)
boomlinde 12y ago
How would you have it? I am thinking that a really good way to dissemble your legal system would be to dissemble the rights it is meant to protect. What is your opinion on other wide-spread encryption schemes like SSL?
AnthonyMouse 12y ago
> This means that more criminals who are legitimately guilty will walk, which means that all of us will be less safe. Serving prison time actually increases recidivism (by increasing debt, straining or severing ties with family and community, creating ties to other criminals, making it harder to find a job, etc.), so it turns out that in practice sending criminals to prison makes us less safe. > The entire system is built around the idea that law enforcement can search and seize evidence if they have a lawful warrant from a duly appointed judge. Unbreakable encryption fundamentally threatens that framework. Putting aside that the system doesn't actually work, it also doesn't require anything you're suggesting it does. Searching a suspect's mobile device is far from the only tool law enforcement has -- and it's one that they didn't have a decade ago, so suggesting that not having it would cause the world to descend into chaos is disingenuous. And the way the system actually does work is by creating a nontrivial possibility that committing a crime will result in punishment, thereby deterring the large majority of prospective criminals. This doesn't require anything even resembling 100% enforcement effectiveness. In fact, its actual effectiveness is almost irrelevant because people have no sense of its true effectiveness and the deterrent is based entirely on what prospective criminals think would happen rather than what would actually happen. That is one of the reasons why the system is so broken -- the deterrent is effective even though the system isn't, so people think it's working and nobody demands that it be fixed. > There are ticking bomb scenarios and other time sensitive situations. Hollywood has confused everyone into thinking that ticking bomb scenarios are common. They are not. In the overwhelming majority of cases, law enforcement investigates crimes after they've been committed, not before. Basing major policy on something that occurs in a negligible percentage of cases is just silly.
- csandreasen 12y ago
  Your argument makes it sound like you're advocating that people who violate the law shouldn't face punishment.
  - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
    What I'm saying is that it's an empirical fact that sending criminals to prison makes you "less safe" than leaving them on the street. That isn't saying they shouldn't be punished in some other way, just that they shouldn't be sent to prison, and anything that causes them to be sent to prison does more harm than good. Imagine someone suggested that forcing criminals to become addicted to cocaine or meth would be a good punishment. Yes, that is definitely a form of punishment. That doesn't imply that doing it would make the world safer or in any way better. Moreover, from a "makes people safer" perspective, if you have a trade off between actual safety against attackers and law enforcement effectiveness, you almost always want to choose the thing that provides actual safety. Law enforcement effectiveness just doesn't make that much difference since actual effectiveness has such a tenuous relationship with perceived effectiveness and perceived effectiveness is what matters for deterrence.
Zigurd 12y ago
You can still get warrants. And they, still, are not a guarantee of obtaining evidence.
- testhater 12y ago
  THE FBI IS TERRIBLE

dragonwriter 12y ago

> Even if the FBI got warrants from multiple respected judges, they couldn't go through that phone to look for clues about where kidnapper may have taken the child. Sure they could. They might not be able to practically decrypt it, just as legal warrants wouldn't magically make them able to practically decrypt encrypted notes on paper in the same situation. > The bottom line is that our justice system is based around the idea that a lawful warrant allows law enforcement to search or seize anything that could be useful in a time sensitive investigation. Which encryption doesn't change. However, our legal system is not based around the idea that everyone has a positive obligation to surrender tools to a third party so that anytime law enforcement has a valid warrant to search and seize something, they also have a third-party other than the target they can go to in order to get assistance interpreting what they've seized. The fact that they ever had that ability with phones is simply an accident of the fundamentally broken approach to security taken previously with mobile phones, which also made them vulnerable without a legal warrant. The correction of that vulnerability may inconvenience law enforcement, but it does so in a way consistent with the inconveniences law enforcement has always faced with the hardcopy documents that were the primary form of data that they might seize for most of the time our legal system has existed, not in some way that is somehow novel or inconsistent with the history of our legal system.

pastProlog 12y ago

Are you talking about the same FBI which tried to blackmail Martin Luther King from giving up his campaign for civil rights in the US - many of those rights ones everyone already theoretically had under the US constitution and court decisions? You're talking about entrusting a government organization which has already repeatedly betrayed that trust to not interfere with political affairs in this country. They've already over-extended themselves in terms of what they can investigate, now you want them to have control of everyone's lives so they can't have any privacy if they wish.

vonklaus 12y ago

>The point that James Comey was trying to make is that we don't want to live in a world without warrants. >Sealed court orders and proceedings for google, twitter, apple, dropbox, yahoo. >NSA scandal. I would rather have a few criminals go free (if the only evidence was on their Apple device) than unfettered access to my data. I guess I just enjoy the little bit of freedom I have left.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

guelo 12y ago

If the FBI doesn't have access to our every thought and desire more criminals who are legitimately guilty will walk, which means that all of us will be less safe. Therefore it is reasonable that the law enforcement should have some ability to access our every thought and desire with approval from the judiciary. We don't want to endanger ourselves in order to protect our banal private thoughts or dissemble the legal systems for the sake of keeping our sexual desires private. Also, something about "think about the children!".

PavlovsCat 12y ago

If the ONLY evidence of something is "encrypted information", doesn't that rule out a lot of crimes, including all physical violence? > Even if the FBI got warrants from multiple respected judges, they couldn't go through that phone to look for clues about where kidnapper may have taken the child. Yeah, and the same goes for when the kidnapper isn't dumb, or doesn't leave their phone behind. Sometimes it's tough. But that doesn't warrant everything. > We don't want to endanger ourselves in order to protect the banal communications on our cell phones or dissemble our legal system for the sake of keeping our sexting private. What you call banals is not banal to me, not at all. I would even say hundreds of millions of people having no expectation of privacy is a much bigger issue than all unsolved crimes in the US put together. And then there are past episodes like COINTELPRO, are there not. I would say that unbreakable encryption, combined with other things of course, makes a lot more impossible than just catching petty criminals via them making silly mistakes. It is also one sandbag against tyranny, and that is also a ticking bomb scenario. That bomb is far from being defused.

boomlinde 12y ago
You are dissembling the legal system by not at least occasionally leaving your phone behind.
csandreasen 12y ago
> If the ONLY evidence of something is "encrypted information", doesn't that rule out a lot of crimes, including all physical violence? All but one of the examples that FBI Director James Comey gave in his speech at the Brookings Institute yesterday[1] were violent crimes (and you could argue that the drug bust was related to violent crime since he said that the group was also linked to homicides and robberies). The last example he gave showed that evidence taken from cell phones has been used to exonerate suspects as well. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkbh5fJoFhc#t=2313 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkbh5fJoFhc#t=2313 (should automatically jump, but if not it starts at 38:33)

boomlinde 12y ago

How would you have it? I am thinking that a really good way to dissemble your legal system would be to dissemble the rights it is meant to protect. What is your opinion on other wide-spread encryption schemes like SSL?

AnthonyMouse 12y ago

> This means that more criminals who are legitimately guilty will walk, which means that all of us will be less safe. Serving prison time actually increases recidivism (by increasing debt, straining or severing ties with family and community, creating ties to other criminals, making it harder to find a job, etc.), so it turns out that in practice sending criminals to prison makes us less safe. > The entire system is built around the idea that law enforcement can search and seize evidence if they have a lawful warrant from a duly appointed judge. Unbreakable encryption fundamentally threatens that framework. Putting aside that the system doesn't actually work, it also doesn't require anything you're suggesting it does. Searching a suspect's mobile device is far from the only tool law enforcement has -- and it's one that they didn't have a decade ago, so suggesting that not having it would cause the world to descend into chaos is disingenuous. And the way the system actually does work is by creating a nontrivial possibility that committing a crime will result in punishment, thereby deterring the large majority of prospective criminals. This doesn't require anything even resembling 100% enforcement effectiveness. In fact, its actual effectiveness is almost irrelevant because people have no sense of its true effectiveness and the deterrent is based entirely on what prospective criminals think would happen rather than what would actually happen. That is one of the reasons why the system is so broken -- the deterrent is effective even though the system isn't, so people think it's working and nobody demands that it be fixed. > There are ticking bomb scenarios and other time sensitive situations. Hollywood has confused everyone into thinking that ticking bomb scenarios are common. They are not. In the overwhelming majority of cases, law enforcement investigates crimes after they've been committed, not before. Basing major policy on something that occurs in a negligible percentage of cases is just silly.

csandreasen 12y ago
Your argument makes it sound like you're advocating that people who violate the law shouldn't face punishment.
- AnthonyMouse 12y ago
  What I'm saying is that it's an empirical fact that sending criminals to prison makes you "less safe" than leaving them on the street. That isn't saying they shouldn't be punished in some other way, just that they shouldn't be sent to prison, and anything that causes them to be sent to prison does more harm than good. Imagine someone suggested that forcing criminals to become addicted to cocaine or meth would be a good punishment. Yes, that is definitely a form of punishment. That doesn't imply that doing it would make the world safer or in any way better. Moreover, from a "makes people safer" perspective, if you have a trade off between actual safety against attackers and law enforcement effectiveness, you almost always want to choose the thing that provides actual safety. Law enforcement effectiveness just doesn't make that much difference since actual effectiveness has such a tenuous relationship with perceived effectiveness and perceived effectiveness is what matters for deterrence.

Zigurd 12y ago

You can still get warrants. And they, still, are not a guarantee of obtaining evidence.

testhater 12y ago
THE FBI IS TERRIBLE