FBI tells lawmakers it can't access Dayton gunman's phone
thehill.com
thehill.com
This disgraceful, emotionally manipulative statement is an obvious lie. Police/FBI/etc have have access to far more information about criminals than any point in history. The average person (criminals included) leaves behind an incredible amount of "digital exhaust". They should be able to build a complete pattern-of-life easily with 3rd party data (e.g. ad tracking), various side channels, and the massive amount of metadata[1] recorded every time criminals used their phone.
Of course, using all of that data to find a criminal requires actual detective work specific to each case. Encryption (especially on a phone examined after a crime) isn't preventing law enforcement from investigating crimes; it is, however, harder to automate. This anti-encryption argument is really about automated mass surveillance, not finding specific criminals.
[1] "We kill people based on metadata" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdQiz0Vavmc
Digital forensics is way outside typical leo training and believe it or not you can make a lot more money in the private sector with IT training.
Local, state and federal case loads get backlogged behind, leaving the highest priority cases to get staffed.
That's the problem: attempting to prevent important new technology (actually-secure encryption) from being used is not a substitute for updated training that provides "typical leo" with digital forensics skills that are increasingly needed.
Susan Landau's 2016 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee regarding Apple's encryption on the San Bernardino shooter's iphone:
>> "Instead of embracing the communications and device security we so badly need for securing US public and private data, law enforcement continues to press hard to undermine security in the misguided desire to preserve simple, but outdated, investigative techniques."
>> "We need 21st century techniques to secure the data that 21st century enemies—organized crime and nation-state attackers—seek to steal and exploit. Twentieth century approaches that provide law enforcement with the ability to investigate but also simplify exploitations and attacks are not in our national security interest. Instead of laws and regulation that weaken our protections, we should enable law enforcement to develop 21st century capabilities for conducting investigations."
>> "Developing such capabilities will involve deep changed for the Bureau, which remains agent-based, not technology-based."
I think, she was referring to classic investigative measures using modern tools and infrastructure.
I think that at this point of the 21st century, this is 100 % detective work.
If Apple does not give you the tools to decrypt messages on their phones, doesn't that make it "impossible" to automate, where automate is defined as any version of "decrypting the data on the phone"?
The second thing is to log iMessage data on the server-side (since it has to be decrypted at some point). This would allow them to produce it, but would miss any apps installed on the phone used for alternative communication.
I don't like to see this so much as Apple refusing but there really isn't a way for Apple to enable easy full access without a backdoor, which is an unrealistic expectation.
iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, so that's also not an option. Apple would have to inject a key they controlled into a user's list of device keys. (Which they can do, and the UI doesn't notify users if it were to happen.)
Keychain, messages, and health data are all E2E encrypted and synced to iCloud.
By not doing iCloud backups, you're basically only giving up backups of app icon placement, home/lock screen background images, app data that isn't otherwise synced via iCloud or the app's dedicated sync service, and a handful of phone settings.
You can opt for the occasional iTunes backup to preserve those infrequently changing elements on the phone, and not have to compromise on recovery point for more important data like messages and security creds since all of that is synced in real time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93Apple_encryption_d...
Although it seems like it would be a RAM-only thing
I'm sure he left evidence that goes well beyond his own phone if he was planning and plotting with others. They should have no trouble piecing this together with or without his phone.
Sometimes, like in this case, it's complicated because they're only out to a few people. I would still rather err on the side of what close friends say rather than family. The family probably had no idea. They rarely do until someone's ready to come out to everyone.
Yeah I was thinking of the same. If they came out to their friends, it's probably who they wanted to be and felt most comfortable sharing with. It was also how they would have liked to have been remembered.
Also, I have yet to hear anyone argue that we should “violate” the 2A, but I have heard lots of 1A discussion about how we could frame laws or discuss whether 2A is worth keeping in its current state.
More like "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." plus "Encryption hinders us from finding people who commit crimes."
More like "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" plus "Pareto is a pain and maybe if we fight encryption we can get public support but we don't want to break it because post hoc analysis doesn't actually help us catch the next guy because Pareto is a pain."
They have no such actual position regarding encryption killing people, they're entirely flexible, able and more than willing to sway with the wind when it presents. Whether or not encryption kills people, so to speak, is not their concern, it's nothing more than the opportunistic excuse framing. They'll use anything that will stick, anything that gets the result they're seeking.
Guns don't kill people, encryption doesn't kill people, backwards nutjobs kill people. Politics in America, currently, can entirely be summed up as the Spiderman pointing at Spiderman meme.
Even a nutjob armed with the latest encryption, still needs a gun to kill people.
To be fair, it can also prevent people from being killed in extremely oppressive regimes, just by association with 'x' out-topic (e.g.: the gay community).
I dunno, I'm pretty sure a determined enough assailant could beat someone to death with a hardcover copy of PGP Source Code and Internals.
or defend their owners, or hunt, or...
If I had to bet, I'd say at least 25% of US guns have been used within the past year, and 99.9% of those will not have been used to kill others.
Having a backdoor in software NOT only enables US government and other cyber criminals to have access. It also enables other governments like Russian, Chinese, Israilean, North Korean governments too! Keep that in mind too.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Austral...
We'll really need sources for claims like that...
* Nearly all iPhone users use iCloud.
* If obeying 'local laws' is enough for Apple to allow external access to iCloud, the same logic must apply to the iPhone.
* Note that Apple refused similar requests by American courts.
I feel like most times I hear iCloud mentioned by non techies they are confused about what it is. Like when their storage is out and they get nagged about it.
Here's a link to start with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
Maybe, in that scenario, gun-rights voters end up carrying privacy-rights US policy influence, but then we might also have a lot of other US people thinking privacy is not for them, in their own day-to-day lives.
Politics and perceptions are way outside my expertise, but things like this sometimes come to mind when working on technical stuff with privacy&security implications.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2016/01/05/462017461/guns-in-america-by-... [1] https://ips-dc.org/three-felonies-day/
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
or Thomas Jefferson in 1787:
"We have had 13. states independent 11. years. there has been one rebellion. that comes to one rebellion in a century & a half for each state. what country before ever existed a century & half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? let them take arms. the remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. what signify a few lives lost in a century or two? the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. it is it’s natural manure."
Now the police even has tanks and army level guns, and the army of course has 1000x the resources, airplanes, drones, etc.
And of course, at the time the states were indeed independent and fighting fiercely for that. Now (and ever after the Civil War) it's all a charade, from what I understand, and it's all as the Federal government says, not really a union of independent states (as independent countries), but a state divided in N prefectures that just happen to be called states...
I'd say this idea, that after you are guaranteed worse results, you should double down, is even more insane.
If anything, what I wrote is all the more reason to find new strategies that don't involve "we'll fight them with guns".
Besides who'll do the fighting? The kind of people that have guns are in more in favor of fascism and army rule than those who don't. So all it takes to get them on the side of the opressors it's to sell it to them as army control, as opposed to "big government" control.
I feel like you have never talked to a gun owner before. Though they may lean towards the pro police/pro military side, they absolutely would not bow to the government implementing some kind of mass martial law.
Lastly, our military swears an oath to the people and the constitution, not the government. Every Soldier, Sailor, Airman, Marine, and Guardsman is bound by oath to refuse unlawful orders. Any hint of stuff like you're talking about would lead to mass revolt within military ranks themselves. Militias would form, and armaments would be taken from the military's caches to launch a resistance.
That's what they pay lip service too. In practice the huge majority are chickens, when they're not pro-army (and the first to cheer for an actual martial law, as long it was done by favorable politicians to them).
>Lastly, our military swears an oath to the people and the constitution, not the government. Every Soldier, Sailor, Airman, Marine, and Guardsman is bound by oath to refuse unlawful orders.
Yeah, good luck with that if push comes to shove.
Because the average law abiding, fast-food fed Joe Public is gonna fight a full on war? Or get guns, support, and people to come join "the cause" from abroad? Or have any advantage over the government forces in "knowing the area"?
Get with the times: our governments oppress and control us in ways that don't require open conflict. The 1860s are gone forever.
Disclaimer: I've never owned a gun, and I have no military or government experience.
I disagree, especially with these quotations, which are disingenuous.
Patrick Henry was a firebrand. His words were meant to incite violence and insurrection for the financial advantage of the order of people to which he belonged.
The Jefferson letter you are quoting[1] doesn't mean what you imply with how you quote it. The real meaning, if you use the sentences right before that, says that some part of the population is always going to be ignorant and misinformed and discontent in proportion to that, and that it's better they rebel openly so they can be corrected, patted on the head, and sent home instead of stewing silently. From that point of view, the people should be minimally armed so this could be accomplished with as little bloodshed as possible.
It's also fraught to impute anything about constitutional matters to Jefferson, since he regarded a constitution perpetuated more than a generation or two as a form of tyranny.
The scholarship on Sparta has been pretty thoroughly revised over the past few decades. Any reference to Sparta rooted before that is of at best suspect legitimacy.
[1]: https://thefederalistpapers.org/founders/jefferson/thomas-je...
And if you kill many more of the enemy than they do of you despite being vastly outnumbered, you can justifiably say you gave a lot more than you got, which is a victory of sorts in its own right.
Getting (benefitting) a lot more than you gave (spent) makes more sense to me.
So there's that...
Guns last a lot longer than 30 years. 80-120 years sounds more like it. They are not going away anytime soon even if you do ban them (which wont happen).
The police in Hong Kong would be a lot more respectful if the (massive, dense) crowd was armed with more than laser pointers. The riots in LA where Korean shop owners defended their property. Etc., etc. Hell there were violent protests in Ferguson, MO not long ago.
"Gun Control" was originally just a mechanism to keep the (black, brown) population from owning guns; just a way of disarming the black/brown population. Look at the past laws, and current policing!
Some people in the US think "It can't happen here, now we should get rid of guns!" - as we watch the authorities putting children in cages, and protests in other countries where the police beat up protesters, and riots where people defend their loved ones and property, the rise of White Nationalism from "simmer" to "boil" and people still think we shouldn't have guns?
There's absolutely no way, in hell, Americans would willingly disarm - nor should we.
This statement is laughable, yet terrifying in its naiveté.
> "Gun Control" was originally just a mechanism to keep the (black, brown) population from owning guns; just a way of disarming the black/brown population. Look at the past laws, and current policing!
The history of gun politics is inextricably tied to race, but your comment is as dismissive of gun control as it is unsupported and vague, as if waving your hands and dropping a hint of racial bias categorically invalidates arguments in favour of restricting firearms rights.
It isn't "a hint of racial bias" - gun control is directly racist, always has been. "Well it isn't now" doesn't hold much water.
The entire purpose and history of gun control in the US was to keep black people from being able to defend themselves from the KKK.
They were all cool with being ground up by armored vehicles and washed down storm drains?
Would the Jews of the Holocaust have rather had guns, or not?
By not having guns, you're not preventing a bloodbath - you're delaying it, and ensuring that you're on the losing side 100% of the time.
Not necessarily insurmountable, but potentially a significant obstacle.
Lots of people care a whole lot about gun rights. And all you need to do is win 1 Congress and presidency, to temporarily reverse the law, and allow people to purchase these guns again, and reverse all the effects of the law.
I don't understand your parenthetical assertion that domestic abuse and mass shootings are not crime. Of course, they certainly are crime.
My point is to separate the actions done by career criminals, (organized crime, burglars, gangs, drug dealers, the mob, etc). As opposed to a casual, accidental, one of, not intended, breaking of the law (even if they committed crime) by an ordinary person who doesn't live off of crime.
(Perhaps the distinction is more powerful in my language, but I think there's a distinction in casual conversation in English too. E.g. you'd call someone who abuses their spouse a "wife beater", or "creep", or "abuser" or several other terms, but you wouldn't say that they lead "a life of crime" (even tho domestic abuse is a crime). The same way you usually wouldn't call a mass shooter a "criminal", but a "deranged person", "psychopath", "terrorist", etc). If I say "criminal" or "outlaw" for example, does that bring in mind someone deep in crime, or a person involved in a DUI?
Anyway, my point is, in a total gun ban, you'll still have the gang/career criminal/etc people have guns and you could even have the same amount of gun crime of that type as now, but you'd have much less murders within a family, mass shootings, etc... -- as it would be way more difficult for lawful people to get their hands on guns, have them casually at home, and e.g. use them on a sudden rage against their spouse or parents or whatever.
(I'd say even the career criminal type of crimes will be less -- criminals will also have a worse and harder supply of guns).
My current preference would be:
1. A weapons licensing program requiring training and passing a test both on general use and much more heavily on safety and responsibility/ethics. Biennial refresher course for license renewal.
2. A complete ban on gun ownership for any violent crime history or history of mental health issues, or known affiliation with a group classified as a terrorist group or criminal gang, or any other well known factors which significantly increase the risk of gun related murder, allowing unlicensed persons access to your firearms, including mandatory immediate surrender of arms and amo for anyone with a gun license if any of these points should become relevant after the fact.
3. Significant funding for means of identifying other factors that could help reduce gun deaths and implementing laws that integrate such factors once they have been demonstrated, as well as education to help the public at large identify the factors that are statistically relevant to gun deaths.
That's such a painfully white suggestion - to readily remove liberties so hard won, in a way that will only effect people of color.
You do know gun control has historically only effected black/brown populations right?
> We can reduce gun ownership Do we actually want that, though? There are murmurs of defensive firearms use instances in the millions annually, whilst there are around 7k non-suicide-related deaths by firearm annually (1) (significantly less if you remove big anti-gun cities from the picture).
Compare firearms deaths with other causes:
* 70,000+ die from a drug overdose (2) * 49,000 people die per year from the flu (3) * 37,000 people die per year in traffic fatalities (4) * 250,000+ people die each year from preventable medical errors. (5) * 610,000 people die per year from heart disease (6)
There are a lot of things that might sound reasonable on the surface that the media likes to tout in the firearms debate, but many of them don’t hold muster. Why guns are the hot-button issue and heart disease isn’t plastered over the media 24/7? I think somebody has an agenda.
[1] 30k deaths per https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_02.pdf, minus 23k suicides per https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhamcs/web_tables/2015_ed_web_... [2] https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics/o... [3] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/faq.htm [4] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... [5] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/02/22/med... [6] https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm
If California's laws prevented some but not all of the shootings then it still should be considered a success.
> Why guns are the hot-button issue and heart disease isn’t plastered over the media 24/7? I
I don't think this is honest. If your mother and father died in a mass shooting you would not feel the same as if they had died of heart disease. To treat the trauma of violent deaths differently from illness/disease is very natural.
Rationally, if heart disease suddenly killed tens of people in a single event you had better believe it would make headlines.
If California's laws decreased the frequency of shootings, we'd expect California's shootings per year per person to be better than Texas.
How many of those had an out of state purchase like the most recent one though (Gilroy)?
That horse has already left the barn.
Heart disease does get public attention -- check your breakfast cereal, as a banal example: odds are it touts its "heart healthiness" -- and gun control isn't 24/7 either.
But there are a few components to consider. One is that gun deaths are traumatic beyond the impact of just the death. The murder of someone you love, where another human being willfully ended their life, is a whole different thing to process psychologically than their death after an illness or even in an accident. Can we reduce those ripples of harm by preventing these murders?
That "willful" bit is important too: a gun enables a person to kill a bunch of other people. Should our society make that enabling easy? Heart disease isn't perpetrated by one person on another. And, yes, you can kill a lot of people at once with a car, too. But a gun's entire purpose is killing; aside from that and sport shooting it's useless. A car is actually better for just visiting grandma or picking up groceries than being a murder weapon.
And the most important point is to rebut the relative privation that you've presented: of course the other causes of death are a problem. That doesn't preclude dealing with this one. Gun control advocates believe that there are obvious, straightforward measures that we're not taking advantage of that can reduce gun violence. Are there such measures for the flu?
Many everything occurs in California. It has 12% of the US population. To be representative, one in eight US things should occur here.
>Why guns are the hot-button issue and heart disease isn’t plastered over the media 24/7?
If someone went out one saturday and gave 20 random people (or immigrants) a heart attack, it would be too. A huge amount of resources are already spent on things like preventing flu deaths. We just all agree it's the smart thing to do, for reasons you cited.
It's not evidence to not ignore gun violence, it's evidence to put as much effort into prevention as we do for e.g. flu and disease.
There's also the problem about gun violence vs. mass shootings, and how regularly the two are conflated. D.C has the highest percentage of gun violence deaths, but only one mass shooting [0] [1].
Of course, two-thirds of gun violence deaths are suicide [2] and about 80% of the one-third that are homicides are gang-related [3].
The war on drugs didn't work; we couldn't keep gangs from smuggling in drugs. What makes any one think we'll do any better with guns?
Next, arguments about high-capacity magazines. It takes three seconds to change an AK magazine [4]; you don't really need high-capacity. Yes, it takes some practice, but not a ton and many of these people start planning a month in advance (see El Paso guy's manifesto). Add to this that you can 3-d print your own [5], and likely manufacture one of reasonable quality. They're really not that complicated.
Finally, remember it really is the "tactical" or "scary" guns after which they go [6]. I'm convinced it's so they can win the white suburban mom demographic with pictures of black plastic pistol grips. Remember that most AR-15s are .223 cal. They would ban those, but let you keep your 30-aut-6. Lord knows how many M1s and Garands are out there, and I've never once heard them mentioned. At this point, I wonder if mass shooters go for an AR-15 because that's what all the others used and every one is just terrified of that one particular gun.
Now let's take President Trump's solution, "red flag" laws. Alan Dershowitz wrote an excellent editorial against these in the WSJ [7]. Such laws are wrong for the same reason "stop-and-frisk" is wrong and for the same reason I object to today's airport "security"; Americans are not to be treated like common criminals without comitting a crime. And if you don't think it will have a disparate impact on blacks and browns, then I've got a bridge to sell you. This also sounds like another brick in the road to a technocratic dystopia, a la China's "social credit score".
As mentioned by others, the opioid crisis is a much bigger deal, as are suicides. This is terrorism, which is designed to cause maximum fear and discord with minimum action. We could be discussing how to allocate resources to the problems which kill the most, rather than being driven by rampant alarmism. I wish we didn't have a twenty-four-hour news cycle going on about it, or politicians trying to make it a number-one issue. Fly the flag at half-staff, say a prayer, do what we can for the families of the dead, and move on. Some time, the cost of the "solution" is greater than that of the problem. Tragedies happen; there is not always something politicians can do. Good policy rarely comes from a place of fear.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/811541/mass-shootings-in...
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/08/05/7435796...
[2] https://everytownresearch.org/gun-violence-america/
[3] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_06.pdf
[4] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FbxWw1fYoGc
[5] https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/01/14/gunsmi...
[6] https://www.propublica.org/article/why-do-democrats-keep-try...
[7] https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-yellow-light-for-red-flag-law...
I'd love to see where people have proposed banning gas cans or truck rentals. (I wish I could also say 'knives', but Britain actually seems to be that retarded)
---------
Or for the really facetious answer, here's a nice post detailing not quite the truck ban you asked about: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-I-need-a-license-to-drive
Yep! You can ban truck rentals with little to no side effects, while banning gun ownership has a history of leading to genocide. Or is that not the comparison you'd make?
> Or for the really facetious answer, here's a nice post detailing not quite the truck ban you asked about
I'm not quite sure what comparison you're trying to make here. Yes, most vehicle rentals require you to show a driver's license, but that's a technical competency requirement, not a intentions requirement.
Basically every other developed country has stricter laws than the US (which is what we're talking about, not full bans). It's ridiculous to suggest those lead to genocides.
* You know what a 100 round drum barrel is.
* You know as well as anyone that automobiles exist, and that local laws can easily be circumvented, and hence has little bearing on how well a similar national regulation might work.
* "Significantly less if you remove big anti-gun cities from the picture". I'm sorry, but this is utterly irrelevant. Why would their regulations or lack thereof matter one bit in deciding whether the people killed by firearms in those areas "count"?
* "Murmurs of defensive firearms use instances in the millions annually" doesn't even attempt to sound evidence-based.
Pretending like you don't understand basic facts does not help your credibility. Although I suspect these talking-point replies are not meant so much to be taken seriously or responded to, but to merely decrease the signal to noise ratio in any discussion so as to drown out legitimate debate.
To take the remainder of your comment seriously:
For both good and bad reasons, people tend to take acts of violence, particularly indiscriminate ones, more seriously than, say, drug overdoses, where people, rightly or wrongly, blame the victim. Of course not all gun deaths are blameless, but neither do we want to pretend like suicides are unimportant.
Finally, we do try to take many of those other causes of death seriously. I get the argument of proportionality (we should spend 10x the effort on drug overdoses as we do on non-suicide gun deaths, I guess?), but unfortunately these stats are usually used in an attempt to say "nothing can be done".
No, something CAN be done. We can and should do better to prevent easily-preventable deaths -- whether or not the victim shares some blame in the death.
If we can save a few hundred or a few thousand lives, is that not a worthy goal? We are on a perennial march to make automobiles incrementally safer, but we haven't insisted that everyone climb into bubble-wrapped cocoons. Our regulators walk a line that sometimes errs to far this way or that way, we fight about it online, we argue with our representatives about it, but overall, progress is being made and lives are being saved.
I'd like to do the same here.
100% irrelevant. Just because there's a lot of heart disease doesn't mean we don't care about gun deaths. If we passed all this legislation and the net result is that the next mass shooters only kills 5 people instead of 10, then it's still worth it. You don't need 100 round clip to defend your home. You don't need a flash suppressors or 1000 yards of range and you don't need an arsenal.
Flash suppressors make shooting at the range more comfortable, and ar15s don’t have “1000 yards of range”, but hunting rifles often do.
And what business is it if anyone in a free country wants to own more guns than you feel happy for them to?
Not sure if you're joking there -- maybe you meant magazines?
Like so many other gun regulation ideas, it seems superficially reasonable based on "danger" but it's almost never the case that items like that contributed measurably to gun deaths. They don't need to be banned -- they are niche items. Mass shooters who have access to them rarely use them. They rarely use 40 or 50 round magazines. Indeed, people rarely purchase magazines larger than the standard 30 rounds.
We can reduce gun ownership...
That is not a legitimate policy goal. The earlier poster points out that gun ownership is not correlated with crime at all. We shouldn't set policy goals that are merely about partisanship -- trying to cut down on gun owners because we don't like them -- rather than a clear public benefit.
...increasing liability for dealers.
I would like to better understand what you have in mind here. In general, modern legal systems reject holding one person responsible for the crime of another. If a mass shooter lawfully purchases a firearm, what possible liability could a dealer have?
Guns that are stolen would carry a punishment for the last registered owner?
Of course authorities don’t always pay attention to registration changes — one UK police force sent me a speeding ticket for a car I had sold nine months previously, even though the DVLA had actually registered the sale and transfer of ownership.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/12/us/gun-traffi...
A 2014 review in the Annals of Internal Medicine concluded having a firearm in the home, even when it’s properly stored, doubles your risk of becoming a victim of homicide and triples the risk of suicide. [0]
Guns are intrinsically dangerous, in much the same way as certain aggressive dog breeds and industrial explosives. While many/most people can safely raise rottweilers, store dynamite, and keep guns, some will not. Is there a marginal benefit associated with the removal of each marginal gun? Obviously. Is gun ownership reduction a legitimate policy goal? Obviously. It's strange that you think otherwise.
> In general, modern legal systems reject holding one person responsible for the crime of another. If a mass shooter lawfully purchases a firearm, what possible liability could a dealer have?
Part of a more involved system of background checks would necessarily involve more action by dealers to verify that the customer's purchase is legal. Prosecuting and holding liable individuals who fail to follow established precautions when selling dangerous products is not unusual.
[0] https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/1814426/accessibility-fir...
It doesn't say that, exactly, since it doesn't distinguish between properly stored and not properly stored cases. It is a meta-analysis; they took a bunch of papers and did the best they could. We can't say that if they're properly stored it's about the same, or worse, or better.
It also acknowledged some methodological limitations, including studying overall death rates, and not specifically deaths due to guns:
...we considered studies of suicide and homicide victimization by any means, and firearm-specific outcomes may differ.
Another issue the study encountered, was that gun ownership rates were not directly available to many of the aggregated studies, which therefore relied on various proxies.
What makes relying on a study like this to initiate a policy of reducing gun ownership not premature?
Part of a more involved system of background checks would necessarily involve more action by dealers to verify that the customer's purchase is legal. Prosecuting and holding liable individuals who fail to follow established precautions when selling dangerous products is not unusual.
We do have laws like this already -- FFLs do background checks for every purchase and if they fail to do so, they can lose their license. What are the expansions that you'd like to see?
We already have background checks. Licensed dealers who fail to follow the law lose their license and are prosecuted. The atf has no difficulty in enforcing that.
And as already posted, there’s really no useful information in that “review”.
30 rounds is standard? That's terrifying.
Anecdata but the NZ shooter had large clips (many dual large clips taped together in fact), and Las Vegas shooter had some crazy "niche" shit.
If it's so niche that nobody cares then what's the harm in restricting things like that? People don't need 40 round magazines to shoot targets.
They don't even need semi-auto to shoot targets, but that's crazy talk.
The same thing goes for asking “Why do you need that?” and if people don’t have a reason you like, taking that as a basis for restriction. In a free society, the people don’t need a reason — we can do what we like. It’s the government that needs a reason. We should be questioning proposed policies, with an eye to the public benefit, not because of any love of guns, but merely out of a basic requirement for government accountability.
A ban on "large capacity" (greater than 10 rounds) magazines was implemented 25 years ago [0]. In actuality, it did very little except to drive demand (and increase prices) for such magazines.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Assault_Weapons_Ban
Though, this reeks of the Executive branch making a scapegoat out of tech to distract from the gun industry, just like getting Walmart to pull game adverts and talking about "red flag" laws.
Is it somehow morally reprehensible? Because it would be ineffective? Do you want the govt to see your dick pics?
I'm curious about about your flat out rejection of this proposal.
The correct framing: "Encryption maintains the status quo by denying law enforcement access to data that previously was not stored"
It's more like burying treasure. The location is a secret map (key) that only you know. The critical distinction here, I believe, is between "having" and "knowing".
And I like to believe we have even stronger rights to what we know than to what we have.
All that said, this is assuming use of working cryptography. With the exception of the technically savvy (those who know how to hid things properly) asking for backdoors into encryption is akin to registering your treasure with the feds, something I'd assume gold miners wouldn't have put up with, for example.
There are two main issues: government abusing its power, and weakening security of everybody. I meant to focus more on the second.
We on HN and every one that really understand the matter will need to keep fight for ourselves and others.
But I believe trying to find a answer to your question a great exercise that contributes very much. I just don't have a good answer.
Maybe something like, they cant even keep our PII safe... what di you think will happened with our key
You can oppose banning/weakening encryption because you believe encryption is an irreplaceable tool for security.
You can oppose banning encryption because you believe that would actually be an ineffective tactic for preventing crime.
You can oppose banning encryption because you believe such bans violate inherent civil liberties.
There's another one that's really hard for me to explain -- You can oppose banning encryption because you've read Shannon or have a general sense of how RC4 worked and it feels just gross to ban basic operations, like shuffling information in a particular way. It's a bit like banning addition, or like banning pig latin.
I hear rebuttals and debates around the first three, but I don't think there's an effective rebuttal to the last one, which is just a paradigm shift. It's like, "I don't support this because I do not understand information the way you do."
Maybe we should print copies of "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" and leave them in hotel rooms, like the Gideons do with Bibles.
You can’t explain it in one sentence, you have to explain cultures, subcultures, how each subculture interacts, etc.
It won’t matter anyway, it impacts the average person in the most indirect way imaginable.
They already have sooo many tools they can use, both with a warrant and bypassing it via FISA. They had all this domestic spying stuff and still couldn't prevent the shooting!
They get nothing with phone access, so why even bother brining up compromising everyone else's security just because they failed to use all their current surveillance means to detect and prevent the shooting to being with?! You want more access? Why? That's fucking unbelievable.
And whilst they have a metric shit-ton of spying capabilities on US civilians, those are not really intended to avoid crime. (Maybe the shift of perception of what is terrorism might change that, though)
> The Dayton shooter left no manifesto.
https://www.vox.com/2019/8/7/20758473/trump-invasion-el-paso...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_th...
The average American rarely ever has to directly confront violence. I've even spent years in major metropolitan areas and the majority of people don't walk around each day anticipating violence. My sister got mugged once, in our small home city, like 20 years ago. I've never personally been mugged or assaulted, but I did have one break in while in NZ (they took all my electronics) and I had a bicycle stolen in Australia.
I haven't lived in "bad parts of town" through (although friends told me I lived in a bad part of town in two places I lived in; but I really feel they were exaggerating) and in high crime areas I'm sure it's different.
But the portrayal the rest of the world sees of America is through a very limited lens. And German or Irish or Chinese person who comes to visit the US will see kids playing in parks, people in the cities walking to work or lunch, others browsing through stores or pumping petrol into their cars and it will generally looks pretty much like every other part of the mid/high income industrialized world.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/03/5-facts-abo...
But I don't feel like I'm going to get shot in the United States. I have never even heard gunfire in the U.S. (off the shooting range!) and I've lived in Brooklyn and Manhattan, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City_P...
I wouldn't categories that incident along with the two recent "actual" mass shootings.
I cannot find anything disingenous about choosing an official definition and mentioning that it is problematic in the first paragraph.
From the article: Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group that tracks shootings and their characteristics in the United States, defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people, excluding the perpetrators, are shot in one location at roughly the same time.
You probably have another definition in mind, since in your mind "mass shooting" is somehow associated with classic amok runs and terrorism. But how is that a counter-argument to using the official definitions and terms, as they are defined by US congress and used by police and the US judicial system? Why on earth would it be disingenuous for them to base their statistics on the official definitions?
Sure, some people think that e.g. gang-related gun violence shouldn't count as a mass shooting even if many victims are involved, but the US congress chose otherwise and the page makes it crystal clear that the definition is problematic.
Is this your citation for the 2013 US Congress definition? (because I don't think it says what you seem to think it says).
https://www.congress.gov/112/plaws/publ265/PLAW-112publ265.p...
If not, please provide your citation so that I can read it and respond intelligently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shooting#Definitions
To quote: " The term was originally defined as the murder of four or more people with no cooling-off period[1][5] but redefined by Congress in 2013 as being murder of three or more people."
Not only that, at the risk of repeating myself, the page you criticize as being "disingenuous" clearly mentions that definitions of "mass shootings" are controversial and provides 5 alternative definitions in the second paragraph of the article and then lists 7 data sources with definitions of "mass shooting" that either coincides with the one by US Congress or is more stringent (based on the pre 2013 definition).
The page also clearly states that "... only incidents considered mass shootings by at least two of the above sources are listed."
There is absolutely nothing disingenuous about this method.
What you and the people who downvote me cannot get into their minds is that there are official definitions that are used in statistics and that the listing on the Wikipedia page takes a slighly more stringent and narrower definition as a basis to safeguard against criticisms such as yours.
Again, you are of course free to re-define the term "mass shooting" differently from what e.g. the US Congress or Stanford University do, but this would not constitute a valid criticism of the list. How could it? Merely prefering your very personal definition over another one doesn't mean anything, especially if it deviates far from the official use of the term.
Frankly speaking, it's not clear what this thread is about. According to social constructivism, social reality might change by re-defining terms like "mass shooting", but according to my sense of reality the number of victims doesn't change at all. I can also see no reason why Wikipedia shouldn't base their lists on the 'most official' terms rather than making up their own, as long as they make clear that this includes multiple homicides by gun, which they do.
Yes. This sub-thread started with someone else arguing that one of the entries on the list of "mass shootings" did not deserve to be on the list.
If the argument is "it must involve deaths to be a mass shooting", that incident also involved zero deaths (and zero innocent civilian injuries).
There is nothing wrong with the list, but there seems to be some metalinguistic dispute about what's the best definition of "mass shooting."
This dispute is merely about words.
For my part, all else being equal, for every N criminal home invaders, the optimal number of home invaders repelled by lawful force without injury to innocent civilians is also exactly N. If you want to mix those relatively rare good mass shootings in with other bad mass shootings (the vast majority of them), that's one way to approach things. You could also keep a list of "Things that happened on Tuesdays in history" and it would be a perfectly self-consistent list.
> good mass shootings in with other bad mass shootings
I'd certainly say that's better methodology than trying to define "good" and "bad" mass shootings and then only list the "bad" ones. (I don't quite see what's good about this shooting anyway, but I suppose you mean that the crime was stopped.)
Of course, you're less likely to get shot in Europe. If you start cherry picking locations, on the other hand, then I guess the US is 100% safe and crime-free, provided you take your mom's basement as reference area.
This is definitely not true. Guns are commonly used in domestic violence situations, or just random household accidents, in a way that poses more danger to Americans everywhere than that experienced by the vast majority of western Europeans (except maybe for those few in the equivalents of their "Chiraqs").
Counting them like this is extremely depressing yet accurate.
A manifesto isn't necessarily honest. It describes how shooters want the world to view their actions, not necessarily the actual motives behind their actions.
If you're fine with phone encryption, you gotta expect the same for computers.
. Were other people involved?
. or other organisations such as extremists organisations?
. Did he have people egging him on (even if totally uninvolved otherwise), or was he a complete loner?
. Is there a hidden motive here that's not obvious?
. Further evidence of stable and rational thinking, or mentally unstable?
. Is it possible he was aided by legal loopholes, or some failures in process that need patching?
. Could he have left any nasty surprises behind?
. Does his behaviour indicate something that would allow prediction of similar crimes and perhaps their thwarting?
. Photos/films of something of interest like supporters, discussions of further action, whatever
In this case, once a crime is committed, all info needs to be gathered. I'm saying that as someone who is disturbed at extensions of state powers, but once there's a crime, I'm all for picking up everything and analysing it.
> and mostly it is redundant with other sources
The main means of communication other than face-to-face is telephone calls and this newfangled web with its many features. Both are provided by a modern smart phone, which most people seem to live through. Therefore you can expect most to all non-F2F comms to go through the phone (typically; not necessarily).
So I can't accept what you say (yet).
> If he used the phone for contacting co-terrorists there are trails in many other locations
These being? You can move about freely in the states, and he was a domestic terrorist.
> unless he really knew how to hide his tracks
Agreed, but it seems most domestic terrorists are bad planners or stupid AFAICS. People like Ted Kaczynski seem to be the exception, most are idiots who will boast online or ask "how can i maek teh THTP" from google.
I care greatly about privacy but when there is legal cause as people have died, my feelings are the law must have access. It is a balance though, and USAins may draw the line differently from brits like me.
I draw the line on the side of privacy. I'm absolutely fine with potential unresolved loose ends in a criminal investigation if it means we actually get to practice real security and gain all the privacy that entails.
Regardless of that, I'm not convinced that the actionable information they could obtain is unique to the phone; there are always several avenues of inquiry for evidence-gathering. It smacks of laziness by law enforcement to suggest it's somehow impossible without encryption backdoors.
It's easy to be abstract - what if it had been your family & family? Or do strangers not count?
> there are always several avenues of inquiry for evidence-gathering
which you've not given, twice.
> It smacks of laziness by law enforcement to suggest it's somehow impossible without encryption backdoors.
It's difficult and I see what you're saying even if I don't yet agree.
I get that elsewhere too - ask about the limits of self-arming and bingo, downvotes without answers, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20606212
It's the online version of turning away with an angry huff because they don't like where this is going.
OK, back to your point, and thanks for a decent response. The encryption issue is difficult and I made it clear I was ambivalent eg. "I care greatly about privacy...". I fully understand the implications of a legal backdoor, and I don't want it [x]. But if phones are the main comms tool now, and if further killings are pending and can be prevented, at least ask the questions.
So I'm wondering if there is some compromise or something. Some way of putting a backdoor in which a 2nd party has a key to (not the gov't). Or something. Yes I'm aware that gov'ts may unfairly lean on the 2nd party. Is there some way through this? Let's try to be creative.
Perhaps this is a mathematically way of proving, based on some assumptions, that I can't have what I want then we can stop wasting time on it and we can get on with the fight against government strong-arming.
Can we at least have a conversation on it without angry, downvote'y silences? This isn't a constructive. It gets us nowhere.
edit, add clarification [x] that if a compromise can't be found and I had to choose between the government having backdoors or not, I'd fall pretty rapidly on the side of Fuck, No. They will be abused. I probably know this better than you.
However we have consistently shown that we are often incapable of competently using that information even when say the family members of a terrorist call us on the telephone and forewarn us let alone when the worrisome info is buried in a mountain of data.
We don't need less privacy or better technology to gather intel. We actually need a smarter system and better tools to sift the mountain of data we actually already possess.
For example if you wanted to know who the person associated with he almost certainly communicated with people in a way that could be obtained by serving a warrant to his ISP.
If you want to know what influenced him looking at his web traffic would be advantageous.
Instead of working backwards from hypothetical lets reason the correct way. What evidence do we have that compelling evidence exists on this particular device.
None.
Now ask: what evidence do we have that compelling evidence DOES NOT exist on this particular device.
None again! We can conclude nothing either way.
Honest question, what am I supposed to make of this?
Terrorists have been on the radar of secret agencies and police in countless cases. Unfortunately, if the police interviews a potential terrorist or mass killer for "behavioral irregularities" or whatever you call it, this will only radicalize the person more and prevent nothing. Or, at least, it is not a very effective intervention. If there is no crime, the police cannot do much.
To be clear, the NSA could probably easily eavesdrop into all cell phone activity within the US and collect heuristic indicators, and it's very likely that they could predict most of these mass shootings quite well based on these indicators. The problem is that this would be unconstitutional and based entirely on thought crimes like "conspiring to commit a terrorist attack". The laws for this are in place and used against international terrorism, but they are highly problematic and shouldn't be extended to domestic terrorism.
Social workers and maybe mental health support by people who do not have to report to the police probably work much better against radicalization and decrease the probability of an incident. I might be wrong but my guess is that in the US almost zero efforts are spent by social services to improve the social situation of right wing gun nuts and de-radicalize them. Again, no need for getting what's on their phone.
> I care greatly about privacy but when there is legal cause as people have died, my feelings are the law must have access.
You can't have both, if there is a backdoor, it is always there, and it will be used for lots of stuff.
Agreed. In another post I said the same thing. That's why I'm against backdoors. If the cops want to access someone's account just because, well they can make sweet luuurve to themselves with an pineapple.
If that person has done murdered a handful of people I want the cops to get access, strictly permitted by a legal, independent entity that people can feel they can trust, as far as is possible. I'm trying to get a conversation going as to how that can be done, if even possible. It's not going well!
yes dammit, that's why I stated I'm against backdoors. I'm not stupid, prime factoring difficulty (or equivalent) is seemingly a fundamental feature of the universe not subject to the will of man, stop assuming I'm stupid.
> and give one to some entity of government, but there is no guarantee that they won't abuse it or leak it or lose it.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH! they will abuse it! I said so! Has all sentience been sucked out of this thread? Has every last neuron here been devastated?
I'm fed up with this. Discourse here is like the offspring of The Golem and Sisyphus - witless strength of one and the relentless compulsion of the other becoming a novel synergy of turbo-futility where fuck all gets done but in increasingly impressive quantities.
People complain about society. Hint: we are all society.
DanG, if (ok, when) you're reading this, sorry about this. Flag away. I'm tired.
To establish legal precedent.
(Disclaimer: I don’t agree with this position but I have a lot of friends who think the government can do no wrong)
The technology is a bit hush-hush, but it is already possible to read brainwaves, and "interrogate" someone through fMRI. Just thinking about your password may reveal it, if they are allowed to force your brain near a reader.
The first serious (public) ventures into this technology was around 2000. Advances in machine learning then made it possible to read objects and concepts that were not in a training set. It was used and tested extensively in Guantanamo Bay. The legal status is still ambiguous, but I guess that it is used just in very special cases (where the detainment itself may be legally ambiguous, such as at a black site).
The Legality of the Use of Psychiatric Neuroimaging in Intelligence Interrogation (2005) https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/906b/8afdd39ecda3a265987a09... [pdf]
Are we going to go through this for every administration now?
Even if you do not have a problem with giving government keys to, say, the iPhone, then you have to deal with every piece of software someone writes to enable encryption.
You'd literally have to convince every person in the world to not write or use encryption software in "the wrong" ways. And, that's impossible because encryption exists to protect society from criminals. I don't see another way around this.
No. Nobody cares about this or that shooter (there'll be another one next week) but the next time there's a 9/11 you can be sure encryption will feature in the news and in a subsequent law.
"Never let a good crisis go to waste" -- Winston Churchill, probably
Well, AG Barr is probably sober. I'll give him that.
Possibly, but Rahm Emanuel said it about 11 years ago [1].
They don’t stand here saying “we need to deal with white supremecists”, they say “we need the ability to violate everyone’s rights”. They already have a public track record of mass illegal surveillance.
I don't understand this. How would getting into his phone post facto stop the shooting? Do they have a time machine?
You're not supposed to think critically or ask any questions. Just quietly go about your life, be an obedient citizen, don't make any ruckus, and, of course, trust the government -- they know what's best for you and me and have nothing but our best interests in mind! Unfortunately, they won't be able to stop all of the pedophile terrorists from getting to us if they don't have access to everything. They're "going dark", remember!?
Why don't you want to give them this access anyways? Just what is it that YOU are hiding? What don't you want them to see?
---
> ... crimes that could have been prevented if law enforcement had been given lawful access to encrypted evidence.
That's an earlier quote from Barr (prior to these shootings).
The implication is that if they had access to all of the encrypted communications in real-time (iMessages, WhatsApp, etc.) that law enforcement maybe could have prevented these deaths from happening (nevermind their "track record" for preventing these types of incidents or the fact that most of these shootings are conducted by a single person)...
...but if they aren't able to read all of our messages then of course they can't do anything and so people will continue to die.
I've been watching the count of up/down votes.
Folks are actually downvoting my comment; please carry on. But why I'm the hell do you want the government to be able to have unwarranted access to your devices?
Previously any letter you sent was not copied,read and stored in a searchable format by the FBI/via/nsa. Maybe if you were targeted but not wholesale dragnet. Now it is and even more accessibility is being asked. This is a kgb dream machine.
By the same reasoning, had the shooter ran away because he drove a car faster than police ones, we should ban all sports cars then?
Lawmakers tell FBI it's too late the dead don't come back to life, and ask what the fuck were they all doing before the massacre given all the warning signs (regarding both the shooter and the readily availability of firearms for purchase)...
1: https://www.engadget.com/2016/04/07/fbi-iphone-third-party-t...
2: https://www.engadget.com/2017/05/08/fbi-paid-900000-to-unloc...
There are technical articles out there explaining it in more detail. On my phone now or would paste some URLs.
There is also a blackhat talk from Ivan Krstic (one of the top security people at apple) where he goes surprisingly deep https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLGFriOKz6U
This will not work for many reasons, most importantly:
- Key escrow or government-enabled crypto doesn't work
- Creating classes of encryption doesn't work (Excluding a group and not allowing them to use the same crypto as another group)
- If someone is going to do something unlawful, they will use something else that isn't accessible by the government; take away phone encryption and they will simply use something else
Unless those points are solved, the whole 'should we allow it' discussion is pointless anyway.
Tacking on to that: most of that stuff doesn't work because you can't really physically enforce it; it's an intellectual barrier which due to the way we can simply talk to each other as humans is super easy to circumvent. This was tried with export controls, but that didn't actually work for the information itself; only for commercial products.
Is it that they need the phone to tell them that white supremacy and assault rifles are things that exist in the US?
Do they need the phone data for a conviction?
I don’t understand what they expect to do with whatever they find that they can’t get from other sources.
They can get location history and a pretty good idea what and who he communicated with from ISP and cell logs, etc.
Access to the phone I think is overrated. Getting access to social media accounts, email accounts, text message, chatting apps, and cloud backup probably gives them more than 80% of what they need.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/fbi-could-have-gotten-...
I don't know much about American law. I was under impression that things are reserved to states unless important reason for them to be handled on federal level.
It also appears some federal legislation has been passed that directs the FBI to provide assistance to state authorities in this cases:
https://www.fbi.gov/about/partnerships/office-of-partner-eng...
The only difference I can think of is the ease of an offline brute force attack due to the fact that you can remove a hard drive somewhat easily and then image it and use an entire datacenter’s power at attacking the passphrase. But a strong passphrase (note, not a password) stored only in your head should be quite secure.
No meaning not proof? Say I FileVault my drive and elect not to store my Recovery Key in iCloud, but write it down. Drive should be FBI safe. No?
No, definitely not the easy access to military weapons for any disillusioned nutjob. That's nothing to worry about. Move along, nothing to see here.
As with all strategic information, they could still possess the ability to backdoor / crack this phone but deem that ability a strategic asset. Only using it in private or when the stakes are much higher than an already committed crime.
More so than even using this event to claim that "guns are the problem" or the sole factor in this issue.
We all know the FBI can access the information on this phone, they're just playing into the hands of emotional trauma and emotionally driven people who are ill informed to de-value the perceived sanctity of privacy and data security...
That would have been a more suitable situation, I’m sure.
Wait, I'm wrong. Even essentially insignificant changes to gun laws at the federal level are harder than banning crypto.
2nd amendment:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
10th amendment:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The first 10 "amendments", which are roughly/essentially contemporaneous with the original document, are referred to as the "Bill of Rights".
FWIW use of the term "sacred" is somewhat iffy as many an atheist has picked up a gun to defend himself.
America was taken over and settled by Europeans who brought firearms for hunting and protection. There were already 20-100 million indigenous American Indians here: they covered the land. But the Europeans brought diseases that few American Indians had resistance to, and most (up to 90%) of the American Indians died of disease before they had so much as _seen_ a white man. Indian societies collapsed and re-coalesced from the fragments. Meanwhile...
https://www.cracked.com/article_19864_6-ridiculous-lies-you-...
Newly-arrived Europeans advanced into a "wilderness" that held the burnt-out remnants of multiple civilizations. Only the very earliest arrivals saw the destruction their diseases had wrought in front of their advance.
With the Europeans came ideas of real estate (ownership rights to land etc.) which the American Indian tribes previously maintained by allegiances and territorial behavior. Anyway, conflicts ensued, new allegiances formed, broke and reformed. This all involved conflicts, fighting and wars. In every step, guns were used by both sides (e.g., American-Indian Wars, Revolutionary War, Civil War).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_campaigns
Early settlers were often on their own. They often had disputes and unpleasant encounters with their own and others. The gun could be used for protection as well as an important food-gathering tool. Although the American Indians could do so easily, living in the wilderness without a firearm was difficult and rare for someone of European descent.
So the use of firearms goes back to the pre-colonial and colonial periods. Guns were always available in the New World and remain available today.
So gun owners feel punished when their guns are taken away, and they feel this punishment is more severe than all the lives that are taken away because of mass shootings?
The underlying thinking here is a kind of collective punishment trading or social bargaining; but that's not generally how regulating dangerous stuff works. There are lots of things that kill comparable numbers of people to guns. Do I need to list them? Generally with things that most people use safely but some people use in a way that gets them or others killed, we don't try to ban them but instead we:
(a) Criminalise misuse adjacent to death based on data (not based on emotion or intuition about what seems "dangerous" to uninformed people). For example, criminalising drunk driving because although it doesn't always kill people, it certainly kills them all out of proportion to other driving.
(b) Introduce restrictions in venue that are conducive to safety.
(c) Try to educate the public and post warnings.
(d) Opportunistically encourage people to delegate responsibility to make things safer, even if we don't change their rights overall. For example, Uber seems to reduce drunk driving deaths; but that was not accomplished by either taking people's cars away or preventing them from drinking.
With regards to guns, there simply is no data to support the idea that assault rifles are more deadly than other weapons; or that other things which leftists oppose -- open carry, 30 round magazines -- lead to much change in the overall rate of gun deaths. Banning these kind of things makes about as much sense as banning liquor that's "too strong" because you tried it and "no sane person would like it".
Rifles are rarely a cause of murder, suicide or accidental death. Yes, they are used in mass shootings -- they aren't used in much else. Do you know how rare mass shootings actually are, and how small a cause of death mass shootings actually are? If we took the same approach to other small causes of death as you are proposing taking with regards to assault rifles, what are the policies we might have?
What definition of mass shootings are you actually using? How frequently are assault rifles used in them? There is a lot of variation in the way they are counted so it's hard to talk about the real impact of what you're proposing.
I have a hard time understanding what does acceptance of danger and self-control have to do with assault rifles? Can't those be exerted with a pistol?
Also I fail to understand how people don't see guns as a liability. Just having one in the house would cause me a lot of headache. Guns can be stolen, kids might find it etc..
Not sure what policy you're proposing but whatever it is, it needs justification -- that's what limited government is about. No restrictions without reasons.
We’re also forbidden to keep plutonium or enriched uranium in our basement regardless of what we use it for.
Hell there’s many free countries where it’s illegal to possess weed.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to look at service pattern rifles in isolation to try to sort out whether they are a problem. They don’t seem to be a major contributor to gun deaths, overall — rifles of all descriptions contribute ~5% of gun deaths every year in the US. Their potential danger may seem great but the data does not bear that out.
You need a cryo probing station of some sort I’m not sure if these even exist for 12/10/7nm logic yet.
You can’t simply decap and image a multi layer chip it’s not 80’s era masked rom.
Nothing than
1) a total banning of sales,
2) a law that requires existing owners to return them for destruction,
3) 5 years jail minimum time for anybody even seen with one (and 20 years if they were involved in any criminal act while carrying it, regardless of the act),
4) and a mass confiscation campaign can't fix...
"mass incarnation"?
Like
https://www.bing.com/th?id=OIP.dL31G5Y3BQIg5Xv075saegHaHa&pi...
??
Is this some new Internet meme (e.g., "spam") that I missed?
seems like more or less a move to create a "think of the kids or innocents" moment to keep things from "going dark".
To quote the onion: ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
O majestic scholarship how elusive you are! I thought I knew you and yet you are my world!
The "right to privacy" refers to a bundle of other rights the state is already spitting all over in direct and obvious violation of the Constitution, and our judiciary is wasting the blood of our great nation's many dead martyrs.
That said, I believe privacy is such a lost cause at this point rayiner might still be arguing effectively for our remaining rights by throwing it to the dogs while they're sniffing for our guns.
Possibly related: https://www.ammoland.com/2013/04/every-mass-shooting-in-the-...
My definition of freedom is that no initiated force is allowed.
That includes no forcing tech companies to put backdoors in their phones.
I'm OK with retaliatory force used in self defense, and I consider having a government and having taxation to fund it to fall under that umbrella. So I'm not an anarchist. Rather, I'm a certain breed of classical liberal.
Your options are basically to either force everyone to use short keys that can be brute forced by the NSA (and anyone with cash to throw at AWS) or to set up a trusted-third party to store everyone's private keys and then either enforce long key lives or come up with a mechanism to transport the keys to the third party as old ones expire.
Weakening encryption would lead to massive issues for both corporate and personal security. What's worse is there wouldn't be anything stopping anyone from rolling their own crypto without the NSA's permission (it's literally just math), so it'd be business as usual for terrorists and black-hats.
Similar things could be done for many forms of encryption at rest secured by a TPM based on a PIN or fingerprints. (Though I am not sure about fingerprints).
This can essentially be done without key escrow. Though you could see this as key escrow where the signing key for code that accesses the TPM as the master key.
But we aren't just surrendering our rights to fear and alarmism.
We are surrendering our rights to authoritarians (and they are bi-partisan, by the way).