Hacker News Reader

> A lot of dangerous criminals are stupid.

The nice thing about stupid criminals is that they tend to be indiscriminately stupid. The ones who don't use encrypted messaging are the same ones who proceed to brag about their crimes in front of strangers, and have their phones turned on and with them during the commission of their crimes, and post incriminating pictures on Facebook, and choose equally stupid and unreliable criminal partners.

They are the low-hanging fruit, so you don't need powerful and invasive tools to catch them because they're practically self-incarcerating. When there are 100 other ways to catch them, there's no point in paying a high price just to have 101.

It's the non-stupid criminals that they have trouble catching, but those are the ones this won't catch either. So you're still paying a high price for really nothing in return.

I think you may be missing a large group of criminals in the middle. Like with ordinary humans in non-criminal context, you have a group of indiscriminately stupid people, a group of very smart people, and a large group - I think majority - that just parrots what everyone else is doing or recommending around them, with very little individual thoughts given.

You can compare it to COVID-19 reactions among the people you know. Almost everyone now keeps distance in public, because everyone knows they should and are expected to. But how many people don't connect this with the fact that they should absolutely not meet up with their friends now? Or that they should absolutely not visit their families this Easter? Or that it would be wise to wash groceries and deliveries?

We could say this parroting group is doing cargo-cult OPSEC. They can know they shouldn't brag about their crimes in person or on social media, and yet at the same time they could easily trip using communication tools they don't understand - unless the industry goes out of its way to make such tripping impossible. I think this is the group the law enforcement is talking about. Not the idiot criminals, not the smart criminals - just regular ones, who don't understand the world they live in well, and occasionally make mistakes.

The group in the middle is the group I'm talking about. At the far edges of stupidity are the sort of criminals who break into an electronics shop to steal GPS tracking devices or try to stick up a police station. The far extremes give you 1000 ways to catch them instead of 100.

The guy who carries his phone with him during the commission of the crime is the guy at the median.

It also doesn't hurt that the average criminal skews dumber than the average law-abiding citizen to begin with. But even for the somewhat above average criminal who gives you ten ways to catch them instead of a hundred, you still don't need eleven because you only need one.

What do you suppose the percentage of criminals is who are so diligent that having default insecure communications is the only way to catch them and they wouldn't have chosen a secure alternative regardless?

>It also doesn't hurt that the average criminal skews dumber than the average law-abiding citizen to begin with.

Is this true? I'd be interested to see the research for this. I would believe that the average convict is dumber than the average law-abiding citizen, but how many criminals are lumped in with the law-abiding citizens simply because they don't say "oh yeah, I break the law all the time"?

You're going to have the Three Felonies A Day problem there, where in practice everybody commits crimes all day long and the people "not getting caught" is really everybody, even including people currently incarcerated who are still guilty of many other crimes they haven't been convicted of.

But if you want to talk about, shall we say, "real" crimes then that's another story. The solve rate for murders is actually pretty high (because they're given significant investigative resources), to the point that the population of convicts is probably not a terribly unrepresentative sample, and the lower intelligence of the convicts is pretty well established.

It also depends how you measure intelligence. The IQ of people who commit politically-motivated bombings is often significantly above average, but they also choose to commit a crime that attracts a hugely disproportionate level of investigative resources and correspondingly has quite a high solve rate despite the perpetrators' supposed intelligence, so maybe there are different kinds of stupid too.

Even if it caught 100%, it would not be worth violating the privacy rights of all of the people who are not criminals.

Signing up to be law enforcement comes with an implicit acceptance of the frustration caused by mechanisms designed to prevent infringing upon the rights of the innocent. It’s part of the job to work hard for a long time and sometimes have to let the criminal go free.

Unfortunately, many prosecutors and cops never learned this, and are all too happy to pursue illegal and invasive methods, or to employ parallel construction to conceal illegal methods.

> Even if it caught 100%, it would not be worth violating the privacy rights of all of the people who are not criminals.

Sounds nice, but have you really thought that through? I think you might be surprised what people would be willing to give up to live in a crime-free society.

It is not possible to imprison 100% of criminals without imprisoning some innocent people by accident (or perhaps intent, as is the case in the USA today). What you are describing is a totalitarian society without the presumption of innocence.

I don't think the "well it wouldn't happen to me" delusion is strong enough for people to actively want that, no.

> I think you might be surprised what people would be willing to give up to live in a crime-free society.

1. Very often, they're quite willing to give up _other people's_ privacy.

2. Have you considered what many people are willing to give up to live in a mass-surveillance-free society? Probably not, because we're never given these options for serious considerations and for us to choose. It's a false dilemma - the state makes the decision, eats away our privacy and uses things like pedophilia as the excuse because it's scary.

3. Let's start with making some sacrifices to prevent criminal behavior by elected officials (Trump family, Biden family, Bush family, Clinton family - I'm looking at you people), and in high finance (2008 crisis racketeers who never faced any criminal action) and once that's sorted out, then let's talk about what more needs to be done to achieve a "crime-free society".

You're making several false assumptions:

1. Presumption of guilt: Law enforcement doesn't go after "terrorists" or "criminals"; they go after _suspects_ in acts of terror or crime. Part of the norms in non-totalitarian states is that people don't get subjected coercive, violent and otherwise harmful action as though they are guilty of anything - until they are formally proven guilty.

2. The assumption that what the state legally defines as "terrorism" is indeed terrorism, i.e. "the calculated use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective. " There is a definite tendency to broaden the operative definition in many states in the world beyond the dictionary definition.

3. The assumption that the state, and its law enforcement organizations, always have the moral high-ground legitimizing its pursuit of terrorists. This is often not the case, as many states engage in terrorism against populations or groups they are hostile towards, while at the same time facing terrorism from those groups.

4. The assumption that the state, and its law enforcement organizations and personnel, don't misuse their capabilities to spy, harass or harm people who are not suspected of committing "terrorism" or any other crime for that matter.

It doesn't seem like they're catching most of the stupid ones now. Companies report child pornography tens of millions of times a year: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/us/online-child-sexual-ab...

Most of which is Facebook posts, which is perhaps the worst platform to use if you wanted to keep your crime secret.

The worry, though, is that the state grows too powerful. A lot of things in our society are built on the foundation of curbing state power (it's actually about curbing absolute power - the state is part of the solution to that). Constitutions serve that function. Every time we let a state erode those kinds of protections we take another step towards the state gaining more control. That usually doesn't end well. Countries that were part of the Soviet Union are still recovering 30 years later.

Speaking of the Soviet Union, you have to remember that it was "law enforcement" that carried out the oppression by the government. Limiting law enforcement seems reasonable to me.

> and pedophiles that are the most dangerous are using far more sophisticated means of communication

Tiktok?

That has a ton of content that can be considered CP if reviews on reddit/yt are believed. Which given its sordid past as Musical.ly its totally believable.

The 1993 WTC bombers got caught when they tried to recoup the deposit on the rented van they blew up. OTOH, we tapped bin Laden's sat phone.

Law enforcement needs to understand that they live under the rule of law.

Otherwise, it would just be another police state: a shadow dictatorship.

Either the rule of law is universal or the country is not free.

Freedom of communication means freedom to hide it (I must be able to use a one-time-pad with whomever I choose).

>But if law enforcement has a tactic that lets them catch, say, the stupidest 30% of terrorists, that's an extremely valuable tactic that probably saves a lot of lives in practice.

Let's mix time frames. Should police be able to catch the laziest/stupidest 30% of people who sell weed? Of people who marry across racial boundaries? Of people who traffic freed property back north? Should the police be able to catch the 30% laziest gays?

This is a ridiculous argument - now. But in 30 years when the US still has the laws, we have to understand there are social norms now that will be completely different and maybe people in the US won't want police to do their job.

The stupidest 30% are walking around with phones that are already easily tracked.

Anecdotally, I can assure that upwards of 70% of criminal defendants have some form of tracking capable phone on them when a crime happens, I don’t think this makes them stupid, just a general reflection of society that such tracking doesn’t happen or isn’t something anyone can see.

It makes them at least careless, and that borders on stupid.

If you have a tactic that catches 30% of the stupidest terrorists you have multiple tactics that catch 30% of the stupidest terrorists, because they are the stupidest.

The actual problem is not being able to catch the smart ones who every now and then do something stupid or lazy or expedient (since even the smartest of humans have moments where they are not at their best).

Engineering society around the police is how you end in a police state.

>I think this sort of thing leads to a lot of frustration on both sides.

The police can be frustrated with the fact that catching the bad guy is hard sometimes. I can live with that.