Hacker News Reader

Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

>Die Nachrichtendienste sollten in digitalen Bereich dieselben Möglichkeiten bekommen, die sie im analogen bereits haben

translated: "Intelligence agencies ought to have the same capacities in the digital sphere that they have in the analog world."

Going to be an unpopular opinion here but i agree with this. I don't think there is any precedent for impenetrable private communication legally or culturally. Capacity to say, tap a phone or surveil communication has existed, of course with a warrant and strict legal checks.

People who want to argue against this need to make a case why legal or cultural standards should adopt to a technology, rather than arguing from technological capacity backwards.

View on HN

I’m not sure I agree. If I chose to build an impenetrable fortress in which to live, and the police wanted to stealthily bug it, they’d have to figure out how to do it, and if they couldn’t get in, tough shit. Or they’d have to ask me nicely or someone else to give them what they wanted.

Furthermore, I don’t think they could really require my hypothetical fortress builder to intentionally build in weaknesses into each fortress they built so that they could get in “just in case”.

Because the laws of physics trump the laws of the sovereign? I agree with the position that law enforcement should be able to attempt to access communications with a judicial warrant. I do not agree with a government mandate to use flawed encryption that would allow anyone to read my communications. It's questionable whether that would even accomplish their stated goals, and personally I doubt it.

> I don't think there is any precedent for impenetrable private communication legally or culturally.

What about discussions between conspirators in the privacy of their own home? Should the government be allowed to mandate that telescreens be installed in everyone's homes, with the promise that they would only listen in when they have a secret warrant to do so?

isn't that already the status quo? Most governments I'm aware of have the right to engage in surveillance of individual homes, albeit with strong requirements. But all guarantees you have right now that no intelligence is bugging your home is the promise (and legal protection) that they don't do it arbitrarily.

While it is lawful for your government to bug your home, it is also legal to own a home that doesn't have a telescreen or to remove a bug if you find one.

Laws against E2E encryption effectively mean that it is illegal to use a communications technology that is hard for the government to interfere with, even if you are not using it to break any (other) law, which seems like a change from the status quo.

You say that, but in at least one case [1], you can be charged with stealing government property if you remove a bug from your car.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/11/man-charged-with...

That case did come to mind when I wrote my previous comment.

> After waiting another 10 days to see if it would start working again, detectives applied for a warrant to search Heuring's home and a nearby property belonging to Heuring's parents. ... Police did find the tracking device.

It sounds like the suspect moved the bug from his car into a house. If you were to move a bug from your living room to your attic (and place a sign at the location of the original bug saying "The bug is now in the attic, feel free to collect it when you find this note") then it might be harder for the police to claim you had stolen it.

But you have right to protect your home by installing better locks, security systems, hell you can go as far as to transform your rooms into sound proof Faraday cages, which would make task of covert surveillance borderline impossible. Law does not mandate that such systems must include backdoor capabilities.

The law effectively mandates that for every lock there should be a master key owned by police. Even in physical world it works poorly (see the joke under the name of Travel Sentry Approved locks) and in digital world it will be even worse, due to the near zero cost of using such backdoor.

> I don't think there is any precedent for impenetrable private communication legally or culturally.

Two people can communicate fairly trivially in person with a reasonable level of certainty that their conversation remains privy to only them and the most a 3rd actor might glean is that the conversation took place; not it's contents.

What you might be confusing is that historically there are inherent weaknesses in using a physical or radio or electronic medium to transfer information from one mind to another and that those have always been exploitable. That exploitation usually comes by "force", for some definition of force depending of the value systems held by the parties involved.

What if someone whispers something in your ear?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com