Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

colechristensen

If I send a text message to my partner in the other room, nobody has any right to intercept that whether I'm a "good guy" or not. Before technology I might have walked into the other room and spoken, if I did that nobody would have any right to enter my home and set up a recording device, that's obvious.

If I hired a messenger to take a spoken message to my partner across town, the same applies. Nobody has any right to interrogate my messenger and he has no obligation to answer.

If I send electronic messages it should be no different.

The fact that interception and surveillance is possible doesn't suddenly make it obligatory.

Technology is power, in whatever form it comes in from weapons to education to communication. That power makes law enforcement more powerful and criminals more powerful.

Law enforcement wants it both ways. They want the increased power of their own encrypted communications, their own education, their own better tools and techniques AND they want to use technology to take away power that their supposed adversaries wouldn't have even been able to lose before the tech existed.

The technology exists. It can't be taken off the playing field. It doesn't matter how bad the "bad guys" are, law enforcement does not deserve that much power in a free society. The power balance between the state's monopoly on force and the people needs to be maintained. If it is not, abuses are inevitable.

If we want to fix this problem, the first step is eliminating Third Party Doctrine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

Basically, it says as soon as you involve a third party - in your example, a messaging app - you can't expect privacy and therefore law enforcement doesn't need a warrant.

If law enforcement had to get warrants for all of this information from services, providers, and vendors, they'd be forced to a) be more selective and b) move slower for judicial review. Both constraints would significantly improve the situation.

If I mail you a letter doesn't that remain private and protected unless law enforcement has a warrant to explicitly intercept my mail?

Not if its over a private carrier. If its over USPS, I think yes they would need a warrant.

They don't need a warrant for anything on the outside of the envelope. They collect this metadata of to/from for every piece of mail sent. https://www.newsweek.com/postal-service-photographs-every-pi...

I don't know if it needs to be completely abolished.

But my phone is my voice, my memory, an extension of my mind in many ways. What is "me" and not a third party extends to the actions I take with my phone.

If we can just say my encryption key with a password in my brain is "me" and not a third party's (which can be true with tech setup correctly) then everything is fine. What I give to the third party is not "private" but acquirable without a warrant. But what I give to that third party is cyphertext. You can read my encrypted messages all you want... in their encrypted state. The decryption keys are private parts of my person and the person I am sending the message to.

Interesting. How does this work for the telephone company? I was under the impression you needed a warrant to get a "soft" wire tap. Once digital switching was implemented, there was code that could record voice conversations. Law enforcement agents could request that the recording be turned on. Source: I implemented this on telephone equipment that most people here are likely to have used ;-). Surely this would be the same.

Now that I think of it, the idea of end to end privacy never really was a thing before we had ubiquitous encryption. Involving a third party always meant that you were vulnerable at that third party. So, I suppose that you could implement laws that dissallow E2E encryption, but still allows encryption from the client to the service -- allowing the service to record the data if presented with a warrant. Now that I think about it, the "wire tapping" code in the telephone switches were literally a legal requirement for selling the equipment otherwise they would never have convinced me to write the code! Now that I'm older and wiser, I'd never do it again... but I kind of understand the symmetries....

CALEA is a new thing.

I'm surprised you've put that ;-) smiley face in your message. Instead of a sad one. You say you are older, wiser, would never do it again. Maybe, when there is an autocratic regime in your country, you'd put that sad face there.

The tech exists. it can be built upon existing social networks and stand in to provide out of network communications when the option avails (i.e; my Bluetooth can reach you through the fog right now - fog being a local mesh network). I’ve spent a bit of time thinking about what this could be like and I imagine it as a blend of impostors and the genuine, real news intermingled with scrawlings found in bathroom stalls, a meta network acting as an overlay, where we shield each other by merely existing, like TOR but every node is an active device in range. I believe in human ingenuity and we’re going to win, on our own terms, with our own devices, and we’re going to get our internet back from the dark and horrible forces that are bending our info system into a weapon against us. /end crazy rant

This. This is so obvious I can't comprehend how people don't realize this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com