Comment by matt4077 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by matt4077 | Hacker News Reader

"Privacy absolutism" is the direct consequence of the Snowden revelations. If the government had not created such a massive apparatus spying on everyone, there'd be room for compromise (if technically feasible).

By creating secret courts, secret warrants or warrantless spying, the gov itself destroyed all faith in the possibility of a compromise that allows access where necessary while safeguarding meaningful privacy.

The NSA now has a profile of my porn preferences. Congratulation! I hope it was worth it – I've since enabled SSL on every domain I control, taught classes on the use of PGP and am one of thousands of non-Americans willing & able to create strong encryption messaging services it Silicon Valley bends to the Gov's demands. The NSA helpfully create a market and at this point any moral qualms I might have once had evaporated.

Reflecting back on the last decade, I feel like a case study in 'unwanted side effects'. I never was (and never will be) an Ayn Rand-style libertarian or one of those conspiracy-peddling bitcoin enthusiast. I've defended the primacy of the law as the only legitimate outlet of power in the face of hands-of-the-internet techno-anarchism. As I'm European, it should also be mentioned that I despise the Anti-american undercurrent so prevalent here, being able to recite most of The West Wing from memory. Hey, my major claim-to-fame is actually a widely-copied photo of Obama at his Berlin rally in summer '08.

But I've apparently made much of same journey as Apple has, which probably never foresaw that it would end it such an open confrontation with the US government (it must be bad for business to take sides in the culture wars).

In fact it seems possible that Apple or I actually never changed. Lesson: if you shift the Overton-window until the moderates become extremists, don't be surprised if they start behaving as such.

People say this a lot, but I'm not sure what it's supposed to mean. Ok, Snowden demonstrated that giving the USG centralized access to communications is dangerous. People don't trust the government. Now what? What's the effective policy response to this?

Crypto advocates (I am one of those) eventually need to stop pretending that there isn't a meaningful tradeoff here. In 10-20 years, everything is going to be encrypted: every phone call, every hard drive, every email, every photograph. That is going to pose real problems for the kinds of law enforcement cases that everyone cares about.

That doesn't mean key escrow is a good idea, or that we should prohibit encryption. But saying "that's not going to be a problem" is just not an argument. You have to do better.

> That is going to pose real problems for the kinds of law enforcement cases that everyone cares about.

Those problems have existing solutions: Place a room bug where the evildoers meet. Use real-world physical surveillance. Track their movements.

The only thing you can't do with existing solutions is to scale them up to pushbutton mass-surveillance numbers. And that's only a problem if you want to use surveillance as a tool to suppress political/social movements, and our beneficent government would never do that.

I agree with you. That's something that frustrates me about the "Going Dark" debate. Crypto can pose real problems for justice and safety, and the answer still probably isn't to suppress crypto. Maybe we should just do a better job of funding investigatory work?

> Maybe we should just do a better job of funding investigatory work?

Many of these supposed problems are a product of "searching under the street lamp." Once you shut off the mass-surveillance street lamp, we may find that the quality of law enforcement rises if only because somebody might get off the internet and look at the backlog of burglary and strong-arm robbery cases.

That's almost certainly true. Electronic surveillance has made it easier for investigators to "cheat" their way through a case. But we fund investigations based on how long it takes an investigator to clear a case, so if we make it much harder to do that, something else will have to give.

> Crypto can pose real problems for justice and safety

Exactly like the worries of "shouting fire in a crowded theater".

If communication leads to an action that has real world consequences, then criminalize and investigate the actual action. Don't take the lazy way and attempt to police communication.

I'm sorry, but I don't understand how this sentiment is responsive to anything I wrote.

"Safety and justice" are abstract concepts. Referencing them without discussing specific situations can only lead one to the conclusion that more is better.

I brought things closer to specifics, while needing to stay general, by asserting that any real crime must have real-world physical involvement, which can always be investigated and policed.

It's always been possible to execute the "perfect murder", although few manage to accomplish it. I don't see how that could possibly change with the addition of bicycles for the mind, unless they lead to psionic powers.

What we're actually "debating" here is law enforcement getting a temporary boost due to criminals' misunderstanding of technology, and now fighting tooth and nail to hold onto the transient. Nobody was breaking out of jail and then posting about it on facialbook in 1950, so in 2050 when someone breaks out of jail and posts on e2e socialnet, police will simply have to use the same classic investigative techniques they've always had.

Right, we need executive powers to be much more willing to embrace the fact that their job is and most importantly should be hard.

I'd never say that strong ubiquitous encryption is not going to be a problem. I'd just say that (a) It's the fault of those who proved they couldn't be trusted with that kind of power (b) Crime is at an all-time low so it weighs lower on my set of priorities, (c) If the "law-enforcement cases that everyone cares about" include drugs I'm starting to be one of the people that don't actually care about those and (c) as I'm not American I think I'm allowed to disregard all law-enforcement arguments until the FBI publishes the framework that allows my local LE to access such data but not the chinese though-police.

>What's the effective policy response to this?

Encrypt all the things.

And that is what is happening, which is why this story is hot. Because, encrypting all the things is a way for the people of a democracy to take back power from their abusive governments.

In the same way that an "encrypt everything" future decreases the current power of a warrant, the current power of a warrant is far above its historical level.

The transition from physical to digital massively increased the amount of data being stored. Your "papers" never recorded your historic location, biometrics, metadata and contents of all (or most) of your communication, etc. It used to be that the government could never access most of that information, warrant or not. Now they can, because our smartphones track all that stuff. The more I think about it, the more I see our digital assistants as extensions of the mind rather than an ever-growing stack of "papers and effects;" it's a difference in magnitude that produces a difference in kind.

I'd argue that the encrypt everything future is more similar to the pre-digital past than not. Before the telephone, law enforcement could never access the contents of a private conversation without physically putting a person in the room or questioning someone involved. I wouldn't say that it's exactly the same; there's a big difference in effort between using Signal and enciphering all of your physical letters, which will admit a difference in adoption rates.

Like the other commenter said, it brings back the importance of HUMINT. But like you said, adding a law enforcement loophole to encryption is not the answer; that would only serve to increase government surveillance power, even if it was gated with a warrant. It's the equivalent of putting a surveillance device in everyone's pocket. Historically unprecedented, even if you need a warrant to access the data on it. Problem is that law enforcement desperately wants to keep that power now that they have it.

IMHO we are in fact facing a choice: make it easier for criminals to communicate, or live in a glass-house panopticon. I don't think there's a middle ground. There's no way to weaken or break crypto... without weakening or breaking crypto.

Freedom with (perhaps) a bit more crime, or totalitarian surveillance state. Take your pick.

Neither of these choices is perfect, but nature seldom provides perfect choices or 100% downside-free options.

nit: direct consequence of the out of control government exposed by the Snowden revelations.

But while Snowden was great publicity, the underlying issue was always there and will always be - you're either in charge of your computing or someone else is. And other people have much different incentives than yourself, especially after they aggregate a trove of everyone's personal data.

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