Not American, but isn't criminality in the U.S. like at about lowest point in history? Is there some actual evidence that the lack of ability to do mass surveillance is somehow making criminal investigations less effective?
I mean, it's always been a bit skewed. Example, Nixon targeting blacks, hippies, and the anti-war left: https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...
There's an intimidation factor behind the thought that the government can read any communication you make, if you give them cause, even if you aren't doing anything wrong.
According to Dan Baum, after Ehrlichman died, years after Ehrlichman supposedly told him. Furthermore, even if Ehrlichman did tell him this, Ehrlichman was convicted of perjury, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice.
Hearsay, from a convicted liar, retold by a biased individual with no apparent proof other than his own word.
This could also be posed as:
> statement from at-the-time President's chief domestic advisor to a journalist during an interview, in 1994
But yeah, he's dead, and the fact that the reporter took so long to make it public makes it suspicious and doubtable.
Your criticism is fair, but surely you can think of a few other examples if you dislike this one? MLK wiretapping, McCarthyism, etc?
If not, and you are up for a read, check out this 69 page document from the ACLU:
https://www.aclu.org/other/unleashed-and-unaccountable-fbis-...
I don't need to read the aclu document. I'm not arguing with you. I'm pointing out that the moment you reference Ehrlichman in any way, you will lose all your credibility again. You do damage to your own causes when you try to mislead people like this.
It's generally been declining since the trailing edge of the Baby Boomers got out of the prime criminality age range.
But the demographically (and possibly also lead-exposure) driven “crime wave” was a boon to political support for law enforcement and authoritarian politicians, so both have learned that selling the idea of rampant crime is a good way to get what they want politically.
Not sure if you are making a claim, but I don't really think this is generational other than a coincidence in technological timing - the time you are talking about is the 90's-2000s, which is when improved surveillance techniques, information sharing databases, and other deterrents became more possible and widely used. At that time most of the people on the ground would be gen-Xers (think 21 jumpstreet, colors, new jack city, boyz n the hood, etc, usa wise)
Also, timing wise, the cold war ended and so along with it much of the foreign funny money on all sides for subversive activities, and police spending went up bigtime in most areas..
As you say, most of that became available in the (mid-to-late-) 1990s and into the 2000s, the crime peak happened in the early 1990s (violent crime specifically in 1991.)
There's something of a demographic case to be made (not so much generational as the fact that the Baby Boom was a boom, and a big demographic bulge going through that age range has an impact), there's a plausible, and arguably stronger, lead exposure case to be made (the decline, and the preceding rise, closely tracks the drop off, and preceding rise, in use of leaded gasoline.)
The variety of intended policy mitigations adopted well after the peak certainly didn't cause the drop, and probably have no-to-minimal impact.
tl;dr: Lead exposure has been shown to stunt intellectual development and increase aggression. With the 50s came the personal automobile, powered by leaded gasoline. Crime rose as that generation grew to adulthood. In the 70s use of lead in gasoline declined due to the clean air act. As that generation grew to adulthood crime rates fell. In the 90s the use of lead was banned. That generation is reaching adulthood now.
Lead polution peaked in 1973, violent crime peaked in 1993.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-crime_hypothesis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposur...
All of those records exist now, and LEOs should have access to precisely none of them.
And at least if they search your desk you know about it. The idea that people can go behind your back and look at your info is disconcerting.
Sort of. We're approaching 1960s level of crime, but it was lower in the early 60s and 50s. I don't know if we tracked it before then. Crime rates, including homicide rates, are about half of what they were 20 years ago, but about 20% higher than they were in the mid 50s.
> Is there some actual evidence that the lack of ability to do mass surveillance is somehow making criminal investigations less effective?
No. Police investigations still tend to use things called search warrants and interrogation of witnesses and suspects to acquire incriminating evidence. Mass surveillance is very expensive in order to be effective.
I have family involved in law enforcement and they are able to request access to stingrays from state or federal police, but their use is fairly limited and still requires a search warrant in many cases. I don't believe it's gone to SCotUS yet, but many appellate courts have ruled that you've got to have one.
But there is reason to believe pre-1980 statistics had a huge problem of under-reporting more or less everywhere, especially in countries as big (and relatively desolate, at the time) as the US. Even just collating reliable statistics is a challenge today, let alone in the '50s.
Nowadays we almost have the opposite problem, with cellphones and vague laws resulting in increased reporting of entire classes of crimes. So having a declining trend despite these development, is either a huge win or proof that statistics can be tweaked at will (as The Wire taught us, and we all know The Wire is all true... /s )
> as The Wire taught us, and we all know The Wire is all true... /s
I could never get in to The Wire.
The very first scene of the very first episode is a courtroom where a woman changes her testimony on the stand, and the prosecutor doesn't: a) show the woman her sworn deposition, b) request an immediate continuance (surprise testimony is one of the things that warrants one), and c) threaten and then carry out charges of perjury against the woman for refusing to testify according to her statement. Instead, the prosecutor keeps asking questions over and over, driving into the jury's mind the woman's changed testimony. I'm not a lawyer, but I feel like I know something of courtroom procedure. This was just so unbelievable that it made me angry that the writers expected me to believe it. It would be like someone hacking a System/360 Model 30 from their iPhone in 10 seconds.
I understand it was for dramatic purposes to lead to the other witness's murder, but it broke my suspension of disbelief so badly I had a hard time watching the rest of the episode. I don't remember if I ever watched the second episode.
Not if done right, according to William Binney who worked on designing the systems that eventually (d)evolved to what Snowden leaked information about.
That was re: (actual) national security - but the same mechanisms are at play: if you can record what you need to achieve a stated goal for 250m - why do that if you can spend N billion on a less efficient system?
Compared to manual policing, automated surveillance is a really cheap way to run a police state.
Now, if the goal is to minimise crime, as opposed to maximise catching criminals (which really should be a means to an end, not a goal in itself) - better welfare, psychic health services and after school activities are probably the way to go...
Mental health services?
[1] http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/427758/careful-panic-vi...
[2] https://www.factcheck.org/2016/07/dueling-claims-on-crime-tr...
What other kinds of crime are there, and how would you measure how much of it there is?
They know that "outlaw secure encryption to stop inside traders" is going to be an even tougher sell than "outlaw secure encryption to stop murderers," so they try to make an illogical argument involving scary criminals instead of a stronger argument with not-scary criminals.
The white collar crime, yeah, some forms of it might benefit from encrypted communication. But again, where is the evidence? Is the tax evasion (non-institutionalized) skyrocketing?
The whole claim is just very suspicious. I think there is so much open data today that even with encrypted phones it's much harder to leave less trace than in the past.
The FBI doesn't give a shit as long as it's the anus of the average citizen being ravaged. They only care when it's against the 1%.
In the 60's you also got a lot more check fraud. Which is similar to CC fraud, but that's again for more global.
There's no data I've seen that suggest anything other than a broad decades long drop in crime.
While I count all attacks from a single process to be “one attack” and “one crime”, others may not.
Then there’s “unlawful pornography”, which varies wildly by jurisdiction — when a friend pointed me at fetlife, one of my thoughts was that the entire site is illegal to view in the UK unless you disable images (I’m no lawyer though).
There are probably a lot of other things describable as “conspiracy to X”, but that’s a guess on my part.
(I think there may be a lot of victimless crimes too, but that’s a different topic).
The problem with large scale conspiracies is that they require a lot of people, and eventually someone slips up. This sort of crime is the bread and butter of the SEC, and they aren't making any claims about it increasing.