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Comment by dralley | Hacker News Reader

>I feel we've been collectively losing the battle to keep our conversations private.

A big part of the issue is that the nature of the conversations has changed. Mail and Telephones were never at any point perfectly private. The idea of having complete privacy in such conversations is actually rather new.

The difference is that those communication mediums now represent nearly all communication, rather than a small fraction of it, and that the effort to meaningfully break that privacy has dropped significantly over what it would have required to surveil millions of people in the 1950s. It doesn't require an East-German-esque security state anymore.

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Great! Long distance communication has finally caught up with fundamental rights!

Had those rights been respected all along instead of exploited by perverted, power-obsessed authorities because of how easy it was, it wouldn’t be such a shock to lose the ability again. At least in the US where a right to privacy is a constitutional guarantee, I would hope that Apple and others would defiantly continue to offer encrypted services despite government threats. It would seem like the Human Rights Act guarantees the same right, though I don’t know if it has any higher precedence than any other act parliament.

> Mail and Telephones were never at any point perfectly private

In principle they were not private but in practice they were because in most places the police had to realize that there was a conversation of interest, get a warrant, and use scarce resources.

Now the authorities are able to use machines to monitor traffic patterns for almost all communication the cost of interception is much lower.

The FBI has a history of illegal wiretapping as old as the organization itself. To keep it relevant to one of this weekend's big film openings, you can read all about how illegal recordings fed the hearings that stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance. And the tradition extends to many other prominent figures including Martin Luther King. And today, this kind of surveillance continues through through more modern guises [0]. The volume of these 702 searches is dramatically down, which is good, but there is no reason to assume that it will stay that way.

Point being, one shouldn't assume that government agencies will adhere to the standard we might wish them to when choosing means of investigation or surveillance.

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/fbi-warra...

Oppenheimer was an obvious target, you and I are much less likely to be listened to when resources are scarce. So in Oppenheimer's time my communications would most likely have been very secure.

But now resources are less scarce and the task is easier so blanket surveillance and recording is more nearly practical.

That's not true, people have stepped aside for 10s of thousands of years to have private conversations they didn't want other people to hear. why does the medium matter, whether is pressure waves from mouth to ears or electron/light communications. Why does anyone have a right to listen in?

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