For me it feels too easy to say "the government" has no legitimate interest in intercepting communications.
This isn't actually true, though. It may be essential to enforcing the law at the level we have come to expect. But that is sort of my point: whatever governments are given, they will come to depend on. Once a capability has been granted them, it can never be taken away.
For instance, let's say someone builds a mind-reading app, that records everyone's thoughts so we all have cool thought journals. Of course it needs to store these journals in the cloud, because why not? This will immediately be used by law enforcement to prosecute crimes. And why wouldn't it be? Everyone's thoughts are literally right there for the taking, sitting in an AWS datacenter somewhere. Once this becomes the norm, it'll quickly be made illegal not to journal your thoughts, using the exact same reasoning you just elaborated. It will have become essential to the enforcement of law that police have this tool. And the people saying that will be right - the removal of that tool will represent a degradation in law enforcement capability, no question about it.
We just have to decide which kind of society we want to live in. Sometimes the price of freedom is more crime. In a democratic society, it's up to us to choose how much of each.
This is a meme that keeps getting repeated by proponents of dragnet surveillance, but they're all palpably quiet after each terror event. Because it wasn't caught despite perpetrators already usually being persons of interest and subject to said dragnet surveillance.
We are far past the point of diminishing returns in terms of counter terrorism efficacy vs. surveillance cost and impact. 'Think of the children' and 'think of the terrorists' are quantifiable, provably, bullshit arguments.
There is a very real cost to widespread surveillance, including financial. You can't justify that cost with preventing maybe 1-10 deaths per year when the same marginal increase in healthcare resources would save 10k-100k per year.
The number of 1-10 deaths per year is completely ridiculous. And distorting the fact that law enforcement is not just about preventing terrorism. Can you count the number of cases where criminals have been convicted because of surveillance?
I don't think you'd like a world where criminals can evade any surveillance just by outlawing all of it. You don't even need to think about drug traffickers, terrorists or pedophiles. Just think about all the "unorganized"/private murderers that have been convicted partly because of telephone recordings or, yes, text messages.
There could be no verifiable data on how much is that. Maybe many, maybe none.
Yet the facts are: terrorism is not a huge threat. There are few terrorists, even fewer successful ones. It's three times more chances of getting killed by a lightning strike here in Europe, than by a terrorist.
Another fact is: the vast majority of people are good decent people, who behave well and not blowing up planes, shooting jews in synagogues etc.
Hence, the surveillance measures taken to "prevent terrorism" have costs vastly surpassing the benefits, since the majority is suffering for the sake of (allegedly) diminishing of already tiny numbers [1] [2].
Not to mention the increase of risk of waking up in a totalitarian state.
[1] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/security/201...
[2] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/2019...
On the other hand, we will suffer horribly under an authoritarian panopticon if it is able to come into existence.
Surveillance powers that are introduced to fight terrorism or child exploitation end up in the hands of local authorities for their war against fly-tipping and dog fouling.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/25/british-counci...
Unfortunately historical precedents shows this to be false -at least to an important degree- meaning this power will be abused and misused: FBI controversies abound[0], from covert operations on political groups (e.g. Martin Luther King) to more recent investigation into misconduct at the DOJ and FBI over its probe of Hillary Clinton's private email server; in the same vein 85.000 law enforcement officers have been investigated in the last decade for misconduct[1], as noteworthy the time the LAPD (Los Angeles Police) helped fuel the crack epidemic[2], or when the FBI mistakenly relied on wrongly classified DNA evidence[3] during 25 years (involving 268 cases), historically some of the strongest racism USA has seen was from the police itself when Harry Anslinger as head of the FBN created the war on marihuana specifically to target black people, famous for saying "This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others."[4]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_FBI_controversies
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/0...
[2] https://www.globalresearch.ca/crack-and-the-contras-how-the-...
[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/people-may-have-been-wrongfu...
[4] https://timeline.com/harry-anslinger-racist-war-on-drugs-pri...
Transgressions about such limits don't somehow make it untrue that many criminal convictions in all sorts of areas are based upon entirely lawful surveillance. I don't think there is any solid argument society would be safer if all such surveillance was deemed illegal.
To allow digital surveillance is to allow the government into your head and our children's heads.
No.
It stops here.
The only benefit to an average user is that no Facebook employee can look at your text messages. Law enforcement agencies don't look at text messages of average users, and even in the collect-everything scenarios, they don't take notice of virtually anyone, on average.
It's really mostly the criminals that benefit disproportionally from default encryption in facebook messages.
From the perspective of US law, you might not want LEAs to read your text messages, but even if they could, they can't do anything about it even up to threatening them. Free speech in the US is pretty limitless, up to the point that such speech infringes on the rights of other people or endangers them.
There is no better way to define "criminal", despite all the shortcomings.
> Free speech in the US is pretty limitless, up to the point that such speech infringes on the rights of other people or endangers them.
The US Constitution explicitly makes calls to violence illegal.
Um, no it most certainly does not.
If an effect can be isolated to being caused by WhatsApp going dark that would help qualify how essential these warrants were to preventing and/or prosecuting crime.
It’s easy to bend statistics, but it would be better than nothing. Right now it feels like we have to take the government at their word when they say this is an important thing they need, with the only evidence for that either being “we used message warrant evidence in court so it must have been critical, right?” or “think of the children!”
The war on drugs and the war on terrorism did no net good. Saying we need to give up our freedom so the government can continue doing those things is naive at best.