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Comment by jbapple | Hacker News Reader

The article says, "The recent attacks have pushed many Europeans to favor greater powers for law enforcement over privacy," but the only direct evidence for this claim is quotes from high-level government employees.

I don't know how it is in Europe, but in the US, there are a number of issues about which surveying congress would give you very different results from surveying the actual residents.

Furthermore, no evidence is presented that the recent terror attacks changed the minds of the politicians quoted in this article; before the recent terror attacks, there were already high-level government employees who thought there should be encryption backdoors, I presume. Are those politicians just getting more press now?

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There may be an increase in numbers for those that would now be okay with more surveillance, but probably not very significant. I bet there are a lot more politicians who are now ok with it, though, and they will try to sell it to the population as the "solution" to stopping terrorism - even though, once again, they knew who the guy was, and they could've used a regular warrant to wiretap him.

What pisses me off the most is that after all of these events, it seems nobody from the intelligence community ever resigns or gets fired. Because, of course they must've done their job "flawlessly", and you can't blame them. It's everyone else's fault but theirs.

I hope they won't push for too much besides more public surveillance, though. Because I think the EU could become more of a "safe haven" for US tech companies that want to flee a US government wanting to backdoor encryption or demand that they don't use end-to-end encryption for their services. That could really pay off for the EU economically, in the long term.

> What pisses me off the most is that after all of these events, it seems nobody from the intelligence community ever resigns or gets fired. Because, of course they must've done their job "flawlessly", and you can't blame them. It's everyone else's fault but theirs.

It's absolute transparency for us and an impenetrable wall of presumptive do-gooding and heroism for them.

We know only what they tell us. And we know people with power and no accountability never abuse their positions or violate the public's trust. Only the average joe with a smartphone has that capability.

What pisses me off more is that law enforcement are debating encryption issues while the terrorists are using low-tech devices and attacks to cause the damage.

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