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For example if we suspected someone was using Craigslist and other internet tools like Skype, to organize and coordinate a human trafficking ring, I would want them to be able to collect evidence akin to a wiretap to investiate the extent of the organization and bring prosecutions.

They already have that ability through physical surveillance. accessing fully public data, and subpoenas.

That after-all is the main thing, if the representatives of the people in terms of law enforcement/districts attorneys/federal have a reasonable suspicion that you're committing a crime, we should be allowed to investigate - and for you to challenge any evidence gained in a court. Previous abuses of power are of course troubling, the NSA phone tapping and others comes immediately to mind, which is why I believe energy is best spent on ensuring proper checks and balances and the rule of law - it requires constant work to ensure we have adequate protections for citizens and an adequate ability to prosecute suspected offenders.

I suspect that many arguing against these powers in their entirety have lost all faith in checks, balances, and the rule of law, thanks to numerous prior abuses (using the PATRIOT Act against non-terrorists, NSA warantless wiretapping, etc.). The government is far too interwoven at this point, and the important issues too far from the public consciousness, for an organization like the EFF to make any meaningful difference in checks and balances. As such, the safest route is to oppose easily abused powers in their entirety.

Just a final point - I want to stress that I do believe the government has and will continue to overstep its bounds with regard to law enforcement, this has been true for time immemorial, and citizens will continue to fight back and push for legal reforms - but simply throwing our hands up and ignoring real, legitimate law enforcement needs seems silly too. Especially when agencies like mine can right now hijack individual sessions of you on our website and watch everything you do.

What you call "legitimate law enforcement needs" I call overstepping the bounds of their moral authority for the sake of saving manpower. Are these agencies hijacking sessions on the agency web site, or here on Hacker News? If it's the former, most web frameworks probably have such debugging abilities built in, and as such is nothing impressive. If the latter, it sounds like the agency is running a beefier Wireshark on the whole Internet, which is (or ought to be) illegal.

You can't have systems that are secure except when you don't want them to be. They are either secure and require factoring huge numbers (or other hard problems) break, or they are easily broken fr everybody.

Compound that with a country that is more interested in prosecution and confinement than justice, and you have a very bad mix.

The very existence of National Security Letters makes me fear this kind of power.

It's ridiculous to design a system for the purpose of spying on its users, with users being aware of that. The only people that will be discussing illegal activities using that medium then will be those so oblivious and dense that they likely would have been caught any number of other ways without the eavesdropping.

Savvy criminals will migrate to darknets and other methods of communication that are more robust against eavesdropping.

Personally i think authorities should just give up on the idea of eavesdropping. With proper encryption modern communications can perhaps be intercepted, but never deciphered.

Honeypotting seem like a much better strategy for catching internet criminals. Why would you ever shut down a child porn site or copyright infringement hub when you can instead take over and catch gather loads of evidence for prosecution?

A fine point to be sure, but again we already can see everything a user does on most websites - and most people don't even know about it.

Even with that knowledge though wiretapping still leads people to being caught. http://www.boston.com/metrodesk/2012/04/anthony-dinunzio-bro... So it's obviously still quite effective - and even with encryption they'll still devote man hours to trying to figure out ways around it.

You are imagining sophisticated criminals from movies. Yes, genuinely sophisticated criminal rings with ample resources do exist, but they are in the tiny minority. I think you would be amazed at how low-tech, careless, and quite frankly, stupid most criminals are. This is the common denominator they are aiming at, as it offers the broadest and most dense prosecution yield.

> you would be amazed at how low-tech, careless, and quite frankly, stupid most criminals are

Then I'm sure there are other ways of catching them that don't threaten our privacy and freedom.

More of these activities should be treated as problems instead of crimes. The concept of "crime" conflates problems with a prescribed solution (incarceration) so it becomes impossible to separate the two and be able look upon the problem with fresh eyes and perceive novel solutions.