It's so disappointing to me to hear a quote like that from the President.
Always remember that the FBI was against the civil rights movement and MLK. And consider that one of the leading presidential candidates is getting into the habit of inciting violence: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-rage-and-the-derp--2
I assume many of them are voting for Trump.
Hitler and his Fascist ally, Mussolini, were both far-right contol freaks. Josef Stalin and his predecessors were far left control freaks.
People in power like control, contrary to what they might say. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. People want to be elected because of their egos. Full stop. There is no other reason. No one does it because "they love America". They want to latch onto the gravy train and collect a check all the while dictating terms and or furthering an agenda. It's patently obvious to all.
This is not a coincidence that Hitler's political party (NSDAP) was called National Socialists. Hitler himself was the fan of Karl Marx.
It is worth remembering that effectively ALL totalitarian systems of 20th century were leftist.
Criminals have always tried to hide their activities and keep secrets. Sure with strong encryption maybe some information is hard to search, but that was always the case. (Did they ever find Jimmy Hoffa's body?)
I mostly agree with the idea that we have a lot more to lose by inserting backdoors than we would ever gain.
This is simply Godwin's Law for the modern era.
It seems likely that by far the most prolific creators of child pornography today are... children. What today's parent and grandparent generations used to do in relative privacy behind the metaphorical bike shed, surely today's teenagers are doing with their phones and laptops, perhaps unaware of how insecure and non-private their communications might be.
There are all sorts of difficult ethical questions about how that kind of behaviour should in itself be treated in law, but let's ignore those for now. In any case, if kids are carrying around that kind of material or sending it to each other, surely the best way to protect them is to make sure it stays as private as it should be? That means making everything as secure and safely encrypted as possible. Arguing for weaknesses in encryption or creating backdoor vulnerabilities has exactly the opposite effect.
No, of course we shouldn't. There really are bad people in the world, and some of them really do do very evil things, and there really are good reasons to have police and security services, and they really do need reasonable powers to enable them to do their jobs and deal with the bad people.
But what we should do is keep these things in perspective and ideally set public policy based on evidence and rational arguments. Creating security loopholes that might help the authorities to find and stop a small number of genuinely evil people but might also create millions of new vulnerabilities to be targeted by other evil people (or even the same ones) isn't necessarily a good trade-off.
What's the evidence that we need [abusive bill of the day] to fix that?
Why do we think the potential harm averted is greater than the harm we know comes from overreaching laws and abusive governments?
Human trafficking at all, sex or otherwise, is horrible, common, and relatively easily stopped without new laws - at least for the victims of the moment - so go spend time and effort helping rather than beating the panic drum as you are now.
If certain tales of the dark net are to be believed, it has enabled an unprecedented level of communication between abusers of children. Seems like an obvious "con" of widely-available secure communication.
If you believe the "pros" outweigh it, say so, but don't pretend it isn't relevant.
In addition, the "child pornography" that people want to use as justification is REALLY RARE. The biggest kiddie porn bust in the history of the US was Operation Delego which had 600 members worldwide. Most of whom were busted with good, old fashioned police work.
Now, let's talk about the common "child pornography"--Suzie has naked selfies on her phone. Do you really think that Johnny won't go to a dodgy Chinese site to get the iPhone crack to let him see those?
Relevant Dilbert: http://dilbert.com/strip/1996-01-24
Also that and there are so many more successful ways to catch molestation that we aren't taking.
It's not that molestation and exploitation isn't bad, but when you see someone ranting about it you can be pretty sure they're just doing it to push a political goal. It's an obvious call for censorship and more agency funding.
If the list of relevant things could only be five-thousand items long, this wouldn't even be on it.
And then we get to the cons, many of which are potentially Orwellian.
So child porn can be perfectly illegal without having an explicit law saying "Child Porn is illegal". Its creation violates so many fundamentals and its distribution violates a subset of those.
But the reason for the illegality is as important as the legality in the first place. Some of the most horrible nations commit acts we deem moral in consequence but often do them for still vile reasons (ie, you don't execute the mafia boss for rampant murder and robbery, but because hes threatening your own power).
[1] https://www.google.com.br/search?q=appelbaum+right+to+be+ent...
In other words, introducing "guilty until proven otherwise" introduces witch-trials pretty much by definition: if she floats, she's a witch (so far, so good; yay it works); if she drowns (or dies in notprisonnosirnotatall after years of not confessing nonexistent secrets), she was innocent. Of course, there is absolutely no way this might be abused, and certainly not for personal vengeance.
Welcome to Salem, MA.
That is the next frontier. A backdoor into your bank account. There is already precedent inside and outside the US.
Yes, there are bad people doing bad things. But we are enabling much worse people to do much worse things trying to stop the bad people (also, if you make it so the low handing fruit of people who only possess digital data can no longer be used to score political points and to give the appearance of helping, it could force law enforcement to dedicate even more resources to the producers, thus being a win for both freedom and for the innocents needing protection).
If after 8 years you still think Obama is the Nobel peace prize wielding progressive philanthropist you've been fooled into thinking he is, joke's on you tbh.
I point out said comment is perfectly in line with the policies implemented by Obama and his administration during his two terms and OP's incredulity is unwarranted.
Not sure how that's OT or inappropriate but furry muff, HN works in mysterious ways.
Such as the fact that he voted for retroactive telecom immunity as a senator, supported increases in NSA surveillance as a President, and certainly signed off on the extraordinary measures taken to try and apprehend Snowden.
His stance on surveillance is clear. He has strongly supported it since 2008. (Before he was the Democratic nominee he spoke out against it.)
You're going to find, that once you think it through, that you'll end up limiting the rights and freedoms of individuals... there's no getting around that.
Life sucks that way. People were never their own little countries. I just feel sorry for the middle-class suckers that thought they had freedom. Poor guys - they never figured out they were the tools of the wealthy and powerful telling them they had freedom, in order to make them work harder against the lower-class.
Suppose they meet in person to conspire. Would you suggest having every citizen carry un-blockeable microphones just in case?
This is not a "my freedom to swing my fist ends where your nose begins" kinda issue, this is "are we willing to build a police state if it reduced the risk of certain crimes by X%? Even at the cost of creating entry points into all of our communications that can be exploited by unauthorized and misauthorized actors alike..." issue. The ability to retrieve past conversations about conspiracies is a new capability here, not the ability to keep past private conversations secret (that was never as hard in pre-internet/pre-electronic times).
The interviewer in the article says:
"GREENE: But can you just explain why you would compare, you know, a company helping the government design a way to unlock an iPhone to something extreme as torture and ankle bracelets? I mean, that sounds like a very extreme jump."
But actually, an ankle bracelet that reports your location and audio might actually be less invasive of your private conversations in today's world that reporting the contents of your phone.
Not at all. I have the choice to carry / use a phone.
We have no idea what the political and technical landscapes will look like in 5, 15, or 25 years. It is not inconceivable that your governmental identification "card" will morph from the plastic of today into an embedded device in the phones of tomorrow.
People TALK about killing far more than ever seriosuly think about or have the personality to actually do. Bad humour, frustration at work or with partner, or even how to make a bomb or commit a terrorist act (oh al quaida are stupid because, it would make more sense to do x, y then z) can all be topics of conversation amongst law abiding people after a few beers.
So are we happy to move the bar to innocent until silly enough to have discussed robbing a bank? Innocent until found to have mentioned the current taboo issue? Plenty of people have found out the hard way that the TSA, Twitter and airports aren't a great mix for jokes.
I say again, there's good reasons the system sought the evidence first, not retrospective police fishing expeditions.
"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer". Sir William Blackstone 1765.
I see nothing in the new technologies to fault or change those priciples. The only thing that has changed is scale.
Everything the Obama administration has proposed includes all of the above.
For some reason, the libertarians like to ignore the fact that this would all be done under a court order.
Why should we believe them?
What's wrong with conspiring to commit crimes? Also, I would imagine that the US First Ammendment explicitly (if I understand Brandenburg v. Ohio correctly) protects such speech, as long as it doesn't result in "imminent lawless action". So it's OK to conspire to commit crimes, as long as you don't actually commit them.
Edit: Reading Wikipedia [1], it looks that mere conspiracy is not enough for a conviction, but an "act in furtherance to committing the crime" is necessary.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_%28criminal%29#Unit...
Yes, that's exactly what you do. I would much rather we let a few (more) crimes get through here and there. Weakening privacy for everyone isn't worth it.
That's just how society is.
Your choice on whether you want to live with the rest of society or not.
Just making conspiracy illegal doesn't mean you don't value privacy; it depends on what means are permissible to obtain evidence for the conspiracy.
The reality is that security is also suffering when you weaken encryption. Do you want people to be able to track your children? Do you want criminals to know when you are home? Do you want stackers reading messages of their victims? Do you want rapist to know where you and your friends go camping?
These are just things outside the problem that their is a multibillion doller industry depending on encryption in the internet.
With that kind of reasoning, you'll favor research for medicine against rare 100% lethal diseases instead of 20%-lethal cancer...
Yeah
You're going to find, that once you think it through, that you'll end up limiting the rights and freedoms of individuals... there's no getting around that.
No, because in free societies you shouldn't have absolute security.
Life sucks that way. People aren't their own little countries.
Is this where you rip on Libertarians again and talk about "your army".
From that, there is also meta studies/books that has asked what the studies has shown. To take an example, the book freakonomics pointed out that out of all the crime reducing strategies, abortion laws has shown to be one of the best method. Unwanted children tend to have higher risk of being born with low social and economic status, which is then a strong predictor for crime. None of the other strategies that were looked on had any major effect on crime rate.
Then we have surveillance. Government studies has shown CCTV is effective to reduce vehicle crimes, but no evidence is found that it prevent violent crime. One study concluded that better illumination could be a cheap way of cutting illegal activity to the same degree as CCTVs.
Surveillance in stores and bank has shown a very unexpected result. It has proven useless in preventing robberies, and shoplifters are generally not bothered by them. However, studies has shown that employees accounts for 43% loss of revenue from shoplifting and that is reduced by surveilling. Banks was also one of the early adapters who noticed this.
Then we have studies such as the last month from Harvard, which said that the available information that police investigators has when investigate crime is increasing at a very fast rate. "The trajectory of technological development points to a future abundant in unencrypted data," the study said. Comparing today with the days before encryption, and today is much easier time for a police investigator.