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Yep. Many of our laws and regulations sorely need updating to match the world in which nearly anyone can set up 24/7 surveillance very, very, very cheaply and cops can go to a handful of businesses to find out who we talk to, what we're saying, and what we're reading about. Things that made sense when you had to put a guy in a place to keep watch, to follow a guy to see who he talks to, or go door to door to ask folks in a neighborhood what happened on a particular date are much less likely to make sense in the world we live today.
It was explicitly understood that if you used the UK or US post offices, your correspondence could be read. Because it became government/state property the moment you handed it to the post office (this is still the case, I think). Pretty sure this is how all postal services worked.
Telegrams, likewise, were implicitly intercepted.
Sure you can argue that surveillance is new. But so, actually, is privacy. The right to have a private conversation is also new; the idea that your private words were your own and your patriarch/clan leader/priest/boss/judge/monarch/patriarch would not simply be able to demand, with threats, that one or all of the parties recount them would have been shocking. There are surely many things you simply wouldn’t have voiced because one of those people might find out.
Projecting our modern ideas of free speech and privacy onto a pre-communication-age society doesn’t make any real sense.
Nope. For ages (and possibly still today), the only thing that can be casually read by the US post office are the parts of the mailpiece that can be seen without opening the mailpiece. So, the entire contents of postcards can be read at any time. The entire contents of envelopes, packages, and the like cannot.
Engage your brain for a second and ask yourself if the "Founding Fathers" would really have set up a system where the government gets to root through its citizens' private communications without a warrant.
And yes, you can point to how the third-party doctrine enables all sorts of warrantless investigation of the private communications of modern day USians, but the state of the world was way different back when that doctrine was solidified. In a just world, we'd see massive reform to the doctrine to bring it in line with how folks interact with third-parties these days, but authoritarians don't like to be stripped of their tools of oppression and clandestine, unchecked surveillance and will fight very hard to keep them.
It does not feel like the world is a more dangerous place than 30 years ago. I need to see evidence that crime is increasing because of encryption before taking arguments against encryption seriously.
I'm sure sometimes this has an effect but most criminals are still caught. Because they make mistakes too. Communication is only a small part of the chain.
Yes, it’s hard. Surveillance should be hard. Just because it -could- be trivially easy does not mean it is in the public’s interest that it -should- be.
The privacy exposure is so huge with chat control et al that there is effectively no expectation of privacy anywhere ever, from a practical point of view. That is not conducive to a functioning democracy, which only works when there is a delicate and deliberate balance of power between the individual and the state.
you either have encryption, or you don't. there is no middle ground. any measure to force access to encrypted messages would effectively disable encryption entirely.
I just want to make that clear, governments don’t need complete access to your digital life to make the legal system go round.
Unfortunately the argument of strong privacy for everyone loses compared to the emotional argument of “we could have prevented this horrific crime if we had access to XYZ”, in the emotional political arenas
There are reasonable tools that have been deployed and are existing for police enforcement ; notably with the coordination of ISP providers. The fact that encryption has been democratized does indeed change the situation for enforcement but this does not mean everybody should be spied on by default.
Here's the thing, more appropriate tools for criminal activity encompass not only encryption but stenography technics, maybe even just signaling.
It's so easy to bypass that it only steer up the problem an order of magnitude further, makes the life harder for everybody, and creates a situation where everybody's data is basically on some server.
Now, knowing how capable institutions are able to protect data ; well i'm telling you there is 0 way I envision continuing my journey on the internet if it means that everything i look at, say or have an opinion on can be used against me eventually.
Are they? More so than usual? This rhetorical device or similar seems to be always used, no matter the situation or time.
"Criminals are so sophisticated, our jobs are so hard, we need more power" - every police force ever.
"We actually need fewer capabilities and more checks and balances" - no police force ever.
> Now they are facing a situation where not just virtually all communications are encrypted
No, they aren't. Phone is unencrypted. Email is unencrypted. SMS is unencrypted. Some messengers are unencrypted.
Communications can be encrypted; I guess only criminals do that. Or banks. Or businesses. Or the government.
> but virtually all forms of evidence that document a crime are encrypted.
No, they aren't. Etc
What ever happened to innocent until proven guilty?
Any form of blanket surveillance flips this into “maybe guilty so capture and archive surveillance data, and if ever (even years after) are possibly suspicious, comb through archived data to find some form of proof and then build up your pre-text for a warrant… in other words - “maybe guilty until proven guilty’
These are good points, though I'm wondering if the burden of proof has just increased? E.g. in the past there was little permanent evidence, so do we really need to break encryption to prove beyond a reasonable doubt?
It's like lack of DNA evidence making cases seem "unprovable", but then what did we do before DNA was available?