Violent crime, gun crime, murder rates.
What other kinds of crime are there, and how would you measure how much of it there is?
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 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%.
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.
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).