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Comment by syrrim | Hacker News Reader

Everyone here seems to be attacking a point the article didn't make, while avoiding the point that was made. Our legal system catches criminals by looking at what occurred leading up to and following a crime, and using that information to determine the perpetrator. As it stands, most crimes occur in the real world, and therefore most evidence is unencrypted. As things become more and more digital, evidence surrounding crimes will be more digital as well. If everything is completely encrypted, then there will be no evidence for police to look at, no way to trace the perpetrator.

This article has no mention of FBI backdoors, and Obama is in fact asking for people to propose other solutions. The question falls on everyone: How will we catch criminals in the digital age?

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Before the net and big data, investigation for facts based on analyzing clues and motive led to warrants for discovery of information. Even these warrants were only for concrete evidence. They did not allow for the administration of 'enhanced investigation' to draw out the thoughts of the suspects.

What has changed is that the phone has become an archive of my life and contains much more information than just a phone log. Invading my phone is equivalent to invading my brain. The govt already has mountains of metadata. Suspects are not invisible - they already are tagged by association. And email data, text data, and telephone data is all old. Even without decryption, there is so much of it that analysis cannot be done by humans. And by the time it gets to a human it's hours to days old - STALE.

Fresh intel requires surveillance. Drones are as small as flies and just as numerous. Real time surveillance of suspects by robot swarms is far better than analyzing cryptic email messages. Another change that has further enabled tyrannical control now is that tech allows mass surveillance, whereas in the 'good old days' , the govt had to be focussed and behave with more care simply because they did not have the resources to wiretap everyone.

Misuse of data ALWAYS happens because people are people. In the good old days, we would shudder at the idea of a guy like Trump with his finger on the nuclear button. giving him the ability to look into anyone's ledger is just scary.

But it will never be that all data is encrypted and out of the view of police. Even if a person were to encrypt all their own data, then any time that person interacts with the rest of the world, those interactions could be subject to observation/tracking/subpoena/etc.

There will always be crime scene forensics, surveillance cameras, human interviews, and all manner of other data collected and available for police to investigate crimes.

Physical evidence is frequently hidden, obscured, and destroyed. Hiding evidence is constitutionally protected.

Is there more to this argument? "everything completely encrypted" doesn't really mean anything. What problem does the digital age present that require new trade-offs?

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