> ... it won't tell them where the next terror attack is going to take place or who will do it.
No, but I'm convinced this isn't the goal. The goal is to monitor the unrest of the people.
No, but I'm convinced this isn't the goal. The goal is to monitor the unrest of the people.
The rest of it is likely the "ability to just pull up data on anyone at any time just cause".
The old school, "we know where you live, what you said to your husband, and that you had marmalade jam with your toast this morning" spy insider knowledge gambit is a strong manipulation tactic whenever you need to convince someone to "just comply".
Having inside knowledge of mundane things that are assumed to be private hold a lot more sway than you'd think. It can make threatening ordinary people a lot easier. Do governments do this often? Probably not, but when they want to interrogate someone, I can almost guarantee they like to be able to pull up everything private they can as leverage in an interrogation.
Is this useful for national security? Probably not, but since when do governments actually care about national security when they can roll around on a power trip and feel big and godly?
And who knows, maybe you would become a political figure or something of that caliber down the road. You just never know. Don't assume you don't need as much privacy as possible.
By you, I'm speaking in general.
Source (german):
https://www.bussgeldkatalog.org/news/wespe-toeten-droht-ein-...
They don't want new powers, they want their old powers back. When I understood that, I enlightened.
The tools we have made are quite dangerous for this and that's one more reason why we as the techies responsible for the creation of such tools should ensure that this can never ever happen. It's also one the reasons why Phil Zimmermann is one of my personal heroes.
I'm not sure I agree but at least that isn't outright ridiculous like the 18'th century would be.
This knowledge was much leaner when compared to today, but there were less population to begin with, so that knowledge was enough.
Crowded countries like China had its social norms evolved accordingly and differently due to this population density.
Increase in the speed of communication and in overall population allowed greater dissemination in shorter time, that's it. Before, more manual methods worked well enough to get a sniff of these activities, but it doesn't work now. So, governments want their cake back.
CIA did mass surveillance on state level with Crypto AG. Russians bugged whole fleet of diplomatic IBM typewriters. Intelligence agencies listened people via central heating pipes, insiders were planted inside suspected groups... The ways were numerous, and still are. The people, society and technology is evolving. So the game.
I don't support the initiative, but that's the state of the play right now.
This might be backwards when looked from there, but this is how it looks from here.
Nope. E2E communications have buried a lot of stuff proverbially underground. The leaks are reduced. Hence, governments lost the ability to monitor as they liked. There's much more and invisible communication going on when compared to the past, and it's much more detailed and direct. Also its volume has increased exponentially.
So monitoring that stuff got way harder, and they want the easy way back.
Notice the part about where the conspiring here took place and how those conversations were discovered and revealed. Sure two people can communicate over E2E but if you want to start a movement (something that actually would matter rather than just complaining to your bestie), you need to open it up to the public which turns out also opens up the door to people spying on you.
Maybe you're too young to remember a time when no one carried a GPS in their pocket, most payments were done in cash and only banks had CCTV cameras. I'd love to see states and companies take back the "powers" they had back then :)
Intelligence is an old craft. Insiders are old as well. However, speed of life and increase in population coupled with new communication methods invalidate these old methods.
To protect their status quo, governments want their so-called vision back, and then some...
I don't agree. They want both. They want more!
What will happen tomorrow?
But terrorist suspect 'A' communicating with arms supplier 'B' is far more significant than terrorist suspect 'A' communicating with arms supplier 'B' asking 'B' to bring some potatoes tomorrow.
The value can definitely be in the payload, when both parties believe they are using a secure channel, see 'Encrochat' and a couple of others like it. But most of the time the things you should really worry about are going to look like 'bring me some potatoes'.
Boots on the ground, enough people to follow up on the leads available today would help a lot, and a budget to go with it to make that sustainable. Not more tech toys.
Anyway, I've written enough about this subject by now.
Were there no “intelligence boots on the ground” in the places I have mentioned?
It's the human intelligence gathering where these groups are deficient, but that doesn't scale, so just like the start-up investors the governments believe that they will be able to do this on the cheap by widening the net. But that won't work, it just means they'll catch a ton more krill, and very few extra fish.
I absolutely don't agree it's worth sacrificing our privacy though.
In every revolution we've seen, the elites are unable to comprehend or unwilling to compromise, and in every case, the longer it drags on, the more dispossessed they eventually become. US state population trends starting in the 1840s are currently generating increasing unrest as a function of the structure of the US senate resulting in a rule by minority. As the chamber becomes increasingly unrepresentative, the ability to reform it becomes increasingly less probably due to the structure of constitutional reform.
In a more perfect world, US population geographics would be modulated by representative power. That however, is not the case. State and local governments increasingly sort voters by self-selection bias. Further entrenchment and unwillingness to compromise will be gasoline for the current tinder.
The reason why plots get uncovered is usually because someone is stupid, not because of some exceedingly clever bit of code breaking. And let's be thankful for the fact that terrorism wouldn't work if all they were aiming for is mass death of their foes because for all of the fear that terrorists manage to sow they are cumulatively less effective over the course of 40 years than three days worth of COVID deaths,
pitchforks coming near.
Need to hold on to power,
hide secret contracts and manipulation,
threaten incarceration,
to anyone daring to question,
their legitimation.
Control is their only salvation.