You can just open the newspaper for that, no need to eavesdrop on everybody's interaction. This doesn't make any sense.
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.
I don't agree. They want both. They want more!
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...
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,