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Comment by betterunix | Hacker News Reader

The police do not need the cooperation of tech companies to gather evidence. Yes, CALEA made it easier to gather evidence, but the police did a fine enough job beforehand.

What you are ignoring is that this proposal, like CALEA, is really part of a very long chain of events that have led to ever greater police power. If you look at the history of law enforcement for the past 50 years, you see monotonic increases in the power of the police: the power to arrest people, the power to kill people (including the weapons the police carry), the power to conduct surveillance, the power to seize assets, etc. The reason we have the largest prison population on the planet is that we have ceded such vast power to the power to the police (and to prosecutors).

Unfortunately, there are a lot of ring-wing, law-and-order types in this country who see nothing wrong with this picture:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/San_Bern...

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I'll reply to you and 'abecedarius in the same spot:

The problem arises when critical evidence exists only in the infrastructure of some private company. If a case hinges on a fact that is proven only by information that is in the hands of, e.g., Verizon, then yes, law enforcement requires the cooperation of that tech company to gather evidence.

>but the police did a fine enough job beforehand

Beforehand? The police did a fine enough job gathering evidence before technology leapfrogged ahead of them? Sure, they did. Then they sought to adapt our laws to the advancements that we've made. You see power creep in law enforcement; I see power creep in everybody.

"If a case hinges on a fact that is proven only by information that is in the hands of, e.g., Verizon, then yes, law enforcement requires the cooperation of that tech company to gather evidence."

...and if the company lacks that evidence because the police took too long to ask for it, then the case falls apart. So what? Our justice system is not meant to minimize the number of false negatives, it is meant to minimize the number of false positives.

"The police did a fine enough job gathering evidence before technology leapfrogged ahead of them?"

Read the context; the police did a fine enough job of gathering wiretap evidence before CALEA. The phone had been around and in common use for decades before CALEA, and even in the years leading up to CALEA the police had gathered enormous amounts of evidence from wiretaps and pen registers. It was just harder, because prior to CALEA the police had to actually step away from their desks and install a machine to perform a wiretap -- how terribly inconvenient!

"You see power creep in law enforcement; I see power creep in everybody."

Only if you ignore the fact that the police are more powerful today than they were when our parents were growing up. You are not witnessing power creep, you are witnessing a possible minute change in the balance of power between people and the government. Instead of calling up a phone company and demanding a wiretap, the police might have to show up in a data center with a rack-mountable interception device, in the worst case.

It was just harder, because prior to CALEA the police had to ... install a machine to perform a wiretap

Good point. Let's say you're a company like Facebook and the feds come to you with a warrant; would you rather service that warrant yourself (CALEA style) or have them install a Carnivore inside your data center? Which one do you think is going to do more damage?

Sure, Facebook would rather service the warrant themselves than have cops in their datacenter. So what? Let them create a system for working with the police if they are concerned about it.

Consider this problem: if you are running a Tor relay, would you want to be forced to keep logs and make your system readily-accessible to law enforcement agencies? If you use Tor, do you want your circuits to have nodes with special backdoors built in? Do you want to see Tor, Freenet, proxy server and remailer operators put in legal danger or pushed out of the United States?

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