Europol says mobile roaming tech is hampering crimefighters

The legacy telephone network has had hooks for intercepting phone calls built in for many, many decades. While call tracing was difficult in the days of electromechanical telephone switches like the #5 crossbar built in 1947 (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qG5-NntLwA for details), it has been pretty easy since the introduction of the digital switches from AT&T and Nortel (and others) in the 1970s and 1980s.

One of my former employers had to defer revenue recognition by a number of quarters circa 2008 until the Lawful Intercept feature shipped, as it was a contractually required feature for a US carrier that used PPPoE in their access network. So it's been at least 16 years since the ability for law enforcement in the US to intercept all internet traffic of specific customers has been on the books.

People who advocate for the removal of privacy seem to accept five simple assumptions:

- The government always has good intentions

- The government always has good policies

- The government never makes mistakes

- The government leaders and workers never individually abuse their positions

- The government will retain the above properties over historical timescales (i.e. centuries, not years/decades)

The people who believe all these assumptions don't understand the real world, and certainly haven't based these assumptions on any current, historical or theoretical form of government that I can name.

But that doesn't stop them from making assumptions that don't align with reality, or (too often successfully) pushing policies to take away the rights of others.