Hacker News Reader

Comment by multjoy | Hacker News Reader

> Yes. You are describing actual police work; it is how things have always been.

No, it hasn’t. Criminals haven’t always had access to literally uncrackable encryption, both messaging and voice, in a manner that is impossible to attribute to an individual handset or terminal.

Regardless of whether you’re for or against it, you have to admit that this is a boon for criminals as much as it is for everyone else.

Encro failed because the Dutch got all up in their servers (and the owners, who I suspect are now dead as a result, pretended it hadn’t happened) - e2e encryption bypasses that vulnerability.

View on HN

>> Yes. You are describing actual police work; it is how things have always been.

> No, it hasn’t. Criminals haven’t always had access to literally uncrackable encryption,

As a preamble, police already have a vast array of new avenues of surveilling citizens. They have this now and it gives them massively more access to our private data/comms, than ever before. There is little that LEO/Govs/Corps don't have access to already.

Police have never had at-will access to any personal data and communications they desired.

Until very recently: To find info they wanted, police performed police work and commonly found some degree of what they were looking for. But often it was nothing. Under this, society thrived.

What police have right now is massively more than that. In the few spaces where some content might be denied them, they still have the associated metadata which is valuable on it's own (often more so than the contents).

Historically, you and I have always had options and methods of keeping our personal info and our private comms out of the reach of police, govs and other powerful actors. It was good for us and promoted a healthy society.

We have lost most of that. However, using robust encryption we can keep a minuscule portion of our total comms and data out of their trivial reach. What little it is - it is still good for us.

Historical privacy was what we had. Under that condition, societies were healthy and thriving.

Persistent, pervasive surveillance is what we're moving (rapidly) toward. It promotes other types of societies.

>Police have never had at-will access to any personal data and communications they desired.

Wiretaps, postal interference.

None of it was routine, but the tactic for dealing with serious criminality was still there.

>Historically, you and I have always had options and methods of keeping our personal info and our private comms out of the reach of police, govs and other powerful actors. It was good for us and promoted a healthy society.

No you haven't. It is only until very recently that iPhones (less so android devices) have been basically uncrackable (notwithstanding NSA/GCHQ level tactics that aren't going to be used for criminal investigations) and, coupled with end to end encryption, you have a communications system for which their is no practical method of compromise.

It is very good for the citizen, but you cannot argue for it without also acknowledging that it is incredibly advantageous for the criminal. It is without precedent in human history.

I'm not saying that the police should be able to backdoor everything useful, because that's nonsense. What I'm pointing out is that once you realise that your suspects understand how to use signal and how to use a VPN and how to maintain some sort of operational discipline (and this isn't a high threshold), then your crimes become incredibly hard to solve even with a perfectly executed investigation and this is reflected in the clear-up rate.

>No you haven't. It is only until very recently that iPhones (less so android devices) have been basically uncrackable (notwithstanding NSA/GCHQ level tactics that aren't going to be used for criminal investigations) and, coupled with end to end encryption, you have a communications system for which their is no practical method of compromise.

As the comment above clearly and repeatedly mentions, this has been the default for most of history. Previous to the modern digital age of endless location and habit tracking, people could move around without being easily detected except through tremednous, dedicated effort, and communications was easy to secure in simple ways. You're describing a completely new phenomenon that's very dangerous in many ways which go far beyond mere crime prevention, and apparently lamenting countermeasures against it as if they were what's creating a "terrifying" new state of criminals being able to move and communicate without easily being tracked.

No it hasn't.

Your post was easy to open, your phone easy to tap. The use of surveillance equipment was basically unregulated.

You may not have had transaction level monitoring but you certainly had no expectation of privacy at the bank.

Do you people not read? You're harking back to some bucolic, pastoral existence that never existed.

You're kidding right? Your phone was a stationary dumb object that only made and recieved calls if you were there to answer or use it. Your post was sent by paper and a million ways existed to avoid having it traced to your home or to you.

In no real way are these comparable to the deeply granular, deeply rooted 24/7 surveillance of movement, habits, contacts and nearly anything you like, that's today possible against any normally digitally connected person who doesn't take pretty extreme steps to avoid it (steps that by themselves make that person stand out as unusual enough to soon be flagged) I could go on and on with all the ways in which the tracking is pervasive and applied to most of the things we do today, and how none of that existed so autoamtically before the last 30-40 years or so.

Nobody with half a brain here is referring to some bucolic pastoral existence, simply to one in which the tools for tracking were just not like they are today, and if any government wanted to apply tracking of the kind that's pretty much turn-key constant now, it took unusual effort, staffing and specialized procedures.

You're either being deliberately obtuse or have no sense of perspective or idea of what you're saying

You're the one being obtuse.

There has never, in the history of humanity, been a time where a criminal can communicate with other criminals with absolute immunity as they can today.

They don't have "absolute immunity" today either. They can make mistakes, or systems can be hacked as happened with the Encro Chat. And while the government may have used wiretaps in the past, they certainly weren't able to deploy that at the same scale surveillance is enacted today.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com