Now, cops and politicians want to solve all the problems from their desk.
No, sorry, my freedom is not to be sold for their convenience.
You want to catch a bad guy, you get a trained investigation team that follows people, that wires their house, that interrogates neighborhood, etc.
Is it more work ? Yes. Is it more dangerous ? Hell, yes.
But don't say you can't catch criminals because of Signal. What you can't do, is click on a button to spy on people. It's a good thing.
This mantra is just an excuse to chew off chunks of democracy.
There's a subpoena in this process that you're glossing over. You can argue that's too easy or too secretive or something, and that's more than fair, but it's not just 'clicking a button'.
Do you have a source for that?
If you have a subpoena to open a safe, and you realize that you have no tools that are strong enough to open that safe, you don't suddenly blame safes. You don't tell banks they should stop using safes. You don't ask them to create weaker safes robbers can break into.
You try another route.
A subpoena is fair. Asking signal to preemptively not encrypt the data in case we need it later is not.
Those are the tip of the iceberg.
If there is an automated way to get this data, the agencies will do it, and then retroactively generate the paperwork to make it look ok in court if they feel it’s worth their time.
If structurally there is no privacy except some friction with generating paperwork, then we already have solid evidence here in the US in modern times that you defacto have no privacy.
[citation needed]
Further:
Wiretapping is illegal without a warrant. I believe the spirit of the law there implied that wiretapping of [previous, historical conversations] was _always_ illegal, since a wiretap could only be tracking future conversations by its very nature.
The nature of communication has changed, such that all conversations theoretically have a permanent, historical record, despite the intention of those conversations to not have that historical record. It's called "instant messaging", after all, not "perpetual letter writing". It's meant to be an analogue to talking directly with one another.
The path we've gone down where everyone uses a third party to communicate with each other, and that that third party could theoretically record and retain all communications back and forth in perpetuity does not change the _intent_ of the laws as they were written.
The laws were to protect everyone from unreasonable review of their historical actions.
Perhaps you remember that story - I've completely forgotten the source and am having trouble finding it - about the person taken in the night and thrown in front of a judge. He asked what his crimes were, and the judge said "that's what we're here to find out", as they were going to go through everything he'd ever done to find something to charge him with.
edit: another instance would be Lavrentiy Beria, a police chief under Stalin (https://www.oxfordeagle.com/2018/05/09/show-me-the-man-and-i...)
"Show me the man, I'll show you the crime."
That's nothing new, either.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -- Attributed (possibly apocryphal) to Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642).
I don't disagree that overly broad laws are a problem in non-totalitarian countries, but I think that regimes like Stalin's are a special case.
Because my privacy and that of most others who are decent, law-abiding citizens is more important than not making police do their jobs.
How do you think police caught people before apps like Signal? With real police work. Perhaps if they had to spend more time doing that, they wouldn't have time to beat and kill as many unarmed civilians.
If you have someone being blackmailed or defrauded online, what "field work" are you suggesting here?
> "cops [...] want to solve all the problems from their desk."
This literally couldn't be more wrong.
Absolutely.
>In formulating your statement that examining criminal behavior is a problem, you are suggesting there shouldn’t be ways to uncover crimes.
I didn't get that at all. Before Signal and other encrypted apps, folks who didn't want to be spied upon would meet in person, in private places or write messages in code.
That didn't stop the police from bringing down many criminals, such as Al Capone, the New York Mafia and many others, did it? Nope, it didn't.
What you seem to be advocating is that everyone's privacy should be forfeited so police can get information without doing, you know, police work.
I'm all for bringing criminals (especially violent ones) to justice. But I'm not willing to give up my privacy so that police can spend their time eating donuts instead of their jobs.
Feel free to disagree, but I'm going to keep using Signal and be glad of it -- not because I'm involved in criminal activity, but because I value my privacy.
The world isn’t black and white.
I assume you're referring to this sentence in my comment:
What you seem to be advocating is that everyone's
privacy should be forfeited so police can get
information without doing, you know, police work.
What's more, I'm not attacking anything or anyone. Rather, I'm expositing my views WRT encrypted communications and police work.
That you interpreted the expression of my views as an attack says more about you than about me, IMHO.
What is the "strawman" you appear to believe that I've set up and then attempted to knock down?
But I’d say that we should work to make it impossible for mass surveillance to exist, full stop.
Police should have to do real actual detective work to implicate people in a crime.
But when the authorities transgress once too many, the public in general will switch to services that properly defends their privacy.
We can consider this a game-theoretic outcome of abusing the trust of the public. The consequence will eventually be that properly henious criminals will have better tools for not getting caught.
The privacy/security trade-off is vastly overstated.
Regardless, there are far more ordinary crimes being committed than terrorism.
Would YOU be happy spending trillions of dollars with no way to see if it was accomplishing anything, while clear negative effects were also occurring?
doing a lot of work here. To what degree is that simply anti-governmental sentiment rather than an honest evaluation of the agencies in question?
Say you'd be living in a narco neighborhood in Mexico were cartels regularly shoot civilians up in private wars, have you considered how badly institutions could do in comparison?
Your statement is carefully crafted to sidestep this with the wording, "...there exists criminal behavior that most reasonable people would agree is bad and should be stopped that may reach a dead end with services like Signal...", ignoring that the crime of abuse of power is far greater than any crime that could be prevented when it'd granted.
There will always be "some people" that think this way. But more certainly such powers will be abused by those entrusted with them.
What argument do you have that less encryption is the preferred solution?
Meanwhile Encrochat's non-encryption ended up allowing a multinational set of drug cartels to be taken down.
It's not difficult to come up with such examples.
I (obviously) have no idea about the details of that situation, but since a violent crime can't be committed over the internet via a chat app, there ought to be physical evidence of that crime, no?
If there's some sort of conspiracy element to that, I can see how chat logs might be useful.
But attempting to require folks to provide information they don't have (as is the case here) is a fruitless endeavor.
What solution would you suggest? Get rid of encryption? Force providers to collect the contents of their users' computers and phones?
While, as I said, I sympathize with your family members (and you), such an outcome doesn't justify taking away everyone's privacy.
Especially since the vast majority of people are decent, law-abiding folks.
I get that your experiences and the pain they've caused won't allow you to see things differently, but privacy is important, and I for one, won't give mine up without a fight.
Until all of that changes I am not interested in giving them more ammo.
Well, the other bar is "the justice system follows its own rules." That's reasonable enough to ask, isn't it?
That's reasonable.
https://www.lawtechnologytoday.org/2019/08/can-police-force-...
And that's a good thing.
You have added that last line yourself, and it appears to suggest that you would prefer all of humanity be constantly surveilled in case it may catch more criminals.
E2E does not require a valid reason. Its only change as far as law enforcement is concerned is to stop monitoring when they do have a valid reason. (Which I think most people feel is as acceptable trade-off.)
Not only did I not say such a thing (I even said it was easy to argue that encryption is a net win), it’s not something I believe, especially when you put it in such extreme terms. But encryption brings a cost, one that shouldn’t be ignored.
Most people here are taking extreme arguments — assuming everything is about mass surveillance and crimes are more often than not victimless. This ignores the reality that real crimes are regularly happening that most reasonable people would wish to stop, and when you add friction to that, it means there are many cases were justice will not be served.
Any backdoor - any! - will result in your data being exposed, sooner or later. Your Signal messages could then be exposed in a data breach on the dark web for all to see.
It is not worth it to risk everyone's privacy to allow for the chance at easily prosecuting a small number of crimes. Remember - you're not preventing crime this way, just allowing for easy evidence capture. There are viable alternative ways of investigating crimes, as others here have said. There are not viable alternative ways of protecting our data.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.
Now is the time to speak out. By the time you want to protest and push back, it could be too late.
But it can make your life a lot more inconvenient.
Who exactly said this? It's rather the other way around: flagrantly examining and being able to examine non-criminal behaviour at a whim is a problem. The excuse of potentially being able to spot criminal behaviour is not enough.
Absolutely. The other side of that coin is that people are not required to keep (or in this case, even gather) information in a way that allows the government to obtain it.
I'd also point out that this isn't about information that could prove a crime. It's about the government demanding information from a third party about unknown persons and the contents of their personal effects.
Given that Signal doesn't collect or have access to such information[0]:
"...this subpoena requested a wide variety of information we don’t have, including the target’s name, address, correspondence, contacts, groups, calls."
It's not possible to provide it. Are you claiming that Signal should be required to gather such information solely for the benefit of the police?
As the Fourth Amendment[1] to the US Constitution says, in part:
"...and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized"
And since the subpoena was asking for Signal to identify the subject (their name), such a demand is clearly outside the bounds of the Fourth Amendment.
I'll say it again: Whether a judge (in this case, it was a grand jury and not a judge, but why split hairs?) agrees or not, Signal can't provide information it does not possess.
I suppose a law could be passed requiring them to collect such information as was demanded, but it's hard to see how that would be defensible on any grounds.
[0] https://signal.org/bigbrother/cd-california-grand-jury/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United...
Privacy with end-to-end encryption keeps everyone's communications safe. Criminals, politicians, people working for government contractors, and everyone else. This means criminals can get away with more things. It also means that politicians and surveillance governments have a harder time monitoring regular people or their government challengers.