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Comment by tantalor | Hacker News Reader

You mention warrants... please explain how to serve a warrant for E2E encrypted messages without alerting the sender or recipient.

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Looks like law enforcement might have to do their job the hard way and sit outside the target's house or something crazy difficult like that!

Not our job as technologists to enable the surveillance state.

>Not our job as technologists to enable the surveillance state.

Now, let's get back to work on getting facial recognition built into airplane seats.

> Not our job as technologists to enable the surveillance state.

For the government (ie: "the state"). Surveillance of employees and customers is just fine.

slash ess

You assume that nothing is off-limits to law enforcement.

What about confessionals? I bet there have been illegal conversations between bad people in a confessional. Should they be subject to having cameras or microphones in them?

The law doesn't have a right to invade privacy to uphold itself.

That’s an interesting example. Some countries have laws that protect the sanctity of the confessional, but I think police in most countries could install a bug in there with an appropriate warrant (which hopefully wouldn’t be lightly issued). They can usually install bugs in your bedroom in a serious enough case, so there is no doubt that law enforcement does have a right to invade privacy. Even a regular search warrant obviously has the capacity to constitute a huge invasion of privacy.

The same way you would execute a warrant for say known/suspected drug dealer?

You go to court, get the warrant and execute it...think drug dealers haven't destroyed evidence before (flushing it down the toilet isn't just a thing in movies) while police are knocking on the front door?

SCOTUS has presented this exact scenario as justification for no-knock raids in serving such warrants, which created a huge mess.

Ah, the argument of efficiency.

Nowhere does it say that the most efficient method beats the constitution.

I mean, there are things out there that you simply cannot execute a warrant for; for instance, what I'm thinking at the moment.

They're called search warrants. They're not called find warrants.

Why would that be a requirement? How would you serve a warrant to search somebody's home without alerting them, if they won't leave or they have a camera system set up?

No-knock warrants to the rescue! (OK, that's definitely going to alert the resident, but it's explicitly designed to be served in a way that precludes significant reaction time.)

How do you currently serve a warrant for a conversation between two people, without alerting the sender or the recipient?

You serve it on the person who operates the communications technology they are using, or a person who will use the warrant to lawfully break into the premises where they’ll be speaking and install a bug.

In theory, end-to-end encryption should not be vulnerable to this, as long as you verify your friend’s key in person and trust the software not to let it change without warning you. Nothing distributed through an app store can be this trustworthy.

You don't.

Secrecy has no place in the search for justice.

uh - I had to re-read this multi-times. Are you opining we should give up the right of privacy to provide a government who has known to abuse mass surveillance and trust them?

They're saying observing you in secret without a served warrant is wrong. (Not saying I agree either way.)

Gotcha I was a bit slow yesterday this makes more sense

I took it to mean that the police might have to settle for actually serving a warrant to the person they're investigating or someone close to them, rather than some third party under a gag order.

Insert spyware on either end.

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