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Comment by philipkglass | Hacker News Reader

I suspect that the FBI antipathy to encryption, if it's not fundamentally irrational, is actually about white collar crimes: trade secrets theft, money laundering, insider trading, tax evasion... Violent crime leaves abundant physical traces. White collar crimes may sometimes be un-prosecutable or even undetectable without access to electronic records.

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.

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My first guess, when I posed the original question, was organized crime. People who do organized crime would be the ones to benefit the most from encrypted phones. But anecdotally, it seems to me that organized crime is down in the U.S. too. I might be wrong, that's why I asked for evidence.

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.

I too suspect that the FBI's antipathy to encryption is disproportionate to how much it actually hinders law enforcement. But if there were some real reason for the FBI to be this hostile to encryption, I don't think it can be about violent crimes. It has to be more subtle crimes that don't leave physical evidence.

How many bankers have gone to jail for crashing the US economy?

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%.

This would be more plausible if federal prosecutors ever prosecuted "white collar" crime in general, rather than only in particular situations to defend the commercial interests of big donors. To see this, look at how many insider trading investigations are targeted at randoms who occasionally learn some privileged information, compared to those targeted at senior executives who bathe in it all day long. The ratio of bitcoin convicts to great recession convicts is still infinite.

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