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"What's changing is that technologies that dramatically raise the cost of investigating those crimes are now the default."

Do you really think so?

Last time I checked, facebook made really really easy to investigate the live of everyone as never before. I'm not the one that says that, the FBI chief officers said that.

Last time I checked, there are cameras anywhere in the cities, from banks and shops to circulation plates readers with days of video buffers, so if something bad happens(terrorism) they have more information(and less cost) than ever before.

Last time I checked, they store your telephone tower triangulation information that stores when you were at what time.

They even can analogize all telephone communications of the entire country on real time, store them on a hard drive, and transcribe it for easy searching.

Today this people have more information than ever, but of course, they want more because they want to control everybody.

Terrorism and children protection has become the wild card they use to break the freedom of the people, convert us in the serves and making them the masters ( I got to meet the TSA people).

> facebook made really really easy to investigate the live of everyone as never before. I'm not the one that says that, the FBI chief officers said that.

Note that some Facebook investors have professional relationships with the management of In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit VC firm created by the CIA in 1999.

If you had much firsthand knowledge of In-Q-Tel, you wouldn't be implying that Facebook is an elaborate attempt to collect information for the CIA.

I have a friend who is a cop, and on slow days they just browse through the facebook pages of suspects. People regularly publicly post pictures of themselves breaking laws. A paroled felon posted a picture of himself holding a rifle as his _profile picture_ (in the US it is illegal for any convicted felon to posses a firearm).

Wouldn't it be legal for him to hold his friend's gun?

Presumption of innocence doesn't apply to criminals now, does it ?

What are you objecting to, exactly? There's no indication that the police would bypass the judicial system in this case. I would assume they would knock on his door and ask him about it. If they still thought a crime occurred, they'd make an arrest, and then proceed through the system as usual.

No. The law prohibits possession of firearms by felons, not just ownership.

Who is "they" here? The subject of the pronoun seems to shift with each sentence.

Keep in mind that the same organizations advocating the destruction of constitutional guarantees of liberty and freedom are the same organizations that conduct clandestine and often illegal investigations of people like Martin Luther King.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

This isn't a nerd fantasy, the reality is that the FBI is interested in things like which political candidate you support. These aren't investigations to catch criminals, these are investigations to subvert the rule of law and hamper the democratic process.

There wasn't a supreme court decision saying that passwords are testimony because the FBI believed it was testimony, the supreme court decision came about because the FBI believed that it was perfectly constitutional to demand citizens testify against themselves. The mandate of the FBI should not be "maintaining the existing social and political order."

From the Church Committee: Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power. The Government, operating primarily through secret informants, but also using other intrusive techniques such as wiretaps, microphone "bugs", surreptitious mail opening, and break-ins, has swept in vast amounts of information about the personal lives, views, and associations of American citizens. Investigations of groups deemed potentially dangerous -- and even of groups suspected of associating with potentially dangerous organizations -- have continued for decades, despite the fact that those groups did not engage in unlawful activity.

It is a fallacious nerd narrative that LEOs want super powers to keep track of what kind of anime porn you watch. They don't care.

I don't care if they care, I care if they know. If you don't understand this, please don't claim to be a civil libertarian.

You are right of course, but I think tptacek knows the difference too.

"They" is a very broad pronoun. Ban encryption, and sure, detectives will genuinely be able to catch more pedophiles. That's almost certainly true, and I wouldn't dispute it.

But there are trade offs, and you also get more insidious elements. Certain officials in the government care about who you vote for, what websites you visit, what software you have installed, who you communicate with. This isn't new and has been par for course since time immemorial.

I'd liken it to freedom of speech. Most people, if they use freedom of speech to say something controversial, use it to say stupid and socially damaging stuff. Bush personally planned 9/11, Obama is a Kenyan Muslim plant, etc. But it's still worth fighting like crazy to make sure they have the right to say it, because as a society we do better if there is that ability to say whatever you want, even if people abuse it. It's that way we can fight against the government when we need to.

In the same way, encryption is a valuable tool that prevents government power from being exerted when it should not be. This can range from more effectively avoiding government attempts to undermine counter-establishment political organization to opening up markets that should not be being shut down by government violence.

I don't know if you'd even disagree with any of this. It's of central importance, though, to make sure that people know the debate isn't about whether we should allow child pornographers to avoid punishment.

It is a fallacious nerd narrative that LEOs want super powers to keep track of what kind of anime porn you watch. They don't care.

It depends on who you classify as LEO. One of the big paradigms the US Intelligence Community is into, aside from Open Source Intelligence, is behavior patterning and such mundane things as what anime porn you like do play into that.

This is why they mass-collect cell phone & financial records -- not only to see if you're buying a lot of ammonium nitrate, but to data mine everything you're buying and try to assemble a behavior patterning prediction system.

They have tried just that:

   FBI Director Louis Freeh is the most outspoken advocate of encryption
   restrictions. He argues that the capability to conduct court-authorized
   electronic surveillance should be built into any technology, including
   powerful encryption software. [1]

   One Freeh proposal is that all users of powerful encryption software be
   asked to turn over their keys to a third party, so that law-enforcement
   officials can gain access to them with a court order.

   Freeh's allies include his boss, Attorney General Janet Reno, and
   legislators including Rep. Gerald B.H. Solomon (R-N.Y.), the retiring
   chairman of the House Rules Committee.

   "Let there be no doubt," Reno wrote congressmen last year. "Without
   encryption safeguards, all Americans will be endangered."

See also law enforcements contention that they are free to invasively check the data on any laptop or phone that crosses the border, etc.

As always, child porn / blah blah blah (while not minimizing my concern for the children involved) is, as always, merely the excuse. This will, as always, be used for harassing people growing pot or civil rights protestors or to help beat hippies.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/encryp...

Note that current politicians made similar attempts to ban encryption. The current Vice President did, for example:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10024163-38.html

As has the current administration even. This comes up all the time, from both parties.

> It is a fallacious nerd narrative that LEOs want super powers to keep track of what kind of anime porn you watch.

Tell that to the manga translator in Sweden who was recently convicted of possession child pornography, because he had some hentai on his computer[1].

[1] http://juridikbloggen.wordpress.com/2011/01/28/mangadomen/ (in Swedish)