Yes, criminal gangs are bad.
And, for me, and probably many others here too, enabling governments to look at private encrypted messages of everyone is way worse.
Let’s find other ways to prevent these gangs from stealing cars.
Could you watch The Wire and point out exactly what you'd do differently. I'm picking this example, because the whole point of the show is that they're unable to do anything without a wiretap when faced with a sophisticated criminal gang.
Get a warrant, put hidden microphones and cameras into their light switches and ceiling lights.
Turn one of their members into a double agent and get them to spy for you.
Of course that's not as easy as total surveillance. Because it's not supposed to be. The extra effort isn't that hard if you're going against a criminal gang, but it's enough to prevent the state from going "fishing" by surveilling everyone.
But all this assuming you found probable cause to surveil a citizen in the first place. Where's the probable cause coming from?
And that's assuming that they can even figure out who the higher level bosses are in the first place.
There's a basic right to privacy, which can only be restricted with probable cause. Your argument sounds like you disagree with this very basic premise?
No, I don’t disagree with the need for probable cause. I was asking, how do you build the case for probable cause against someone you’ve never seen and whose communication is completely encrypted? You can’t. I don’t have a solution for that, and I don’t think anyone does. I am merely pointing out that it’s a problem, and that the police’s suggested solution is surveillance.
If you backdoor E2EE crypto for one user, you've got to weaken it for everyone. There's no way around that.
What he's arguing for would require wiretapping every citizen, just in case you need to listen to the logs from any one citizen.
Even worse, the criminals will just compile the open source E2EE apps themselves without the backdoor, so the only people you'll be able to wiretap will be law-abiding citizens.
The "best" option (if there even is such a thing) would be to surveil endpoint devices, but the governments have failed to strongarm Apple into complying, so now they're going after the service providers.
Additionally, even with E2EE protocols, you can already tell from the metadata who is talking to whom, which is everything a government needs to get warrants, seize devices, and install surveillance devices.
So in the end, this proposal won't affect criminals, will reduce the security for every law-abiding citizen, and isn't even going to do anything useful against crime.
The standard for probable cause has sharply declined in this scenario you’ve constructed.
And you’re assuming that the government will seize the device, install surveillance software and the criminals will continue to use those devices? I don’t see how.
Even if the government has access to remote takeovers using unpatched zero days, those are not used on local investigations.
The Wire is not a documentary. It is, above all designed to be entertaining. If they thought having a character reveal themselves to be a reptilian alien with bananas for hands made for a more entertaining show people would like, they would’ve done that. The Wire is not a proxy for reality.
But the literal name of the show should be a clue that Wire taps are important. See how they evolve for one. Gangs are always learning, getting more secure with their communication and making it harder to build a case against them. What worked in Season 1 (pagers) doesn't work in Season 3 (burners). Once Season 3 is over everything about how burners were surveilled is then public record, so criminal gangs switch up once more, making it even harder.
Now if you made a show with all the criminals using encrypted, disappearing messages - that would be basically unbreakable. Which was my point.
A few of the pieces were taken off the board, soon to be replaced by new pieces. But the kings stayed the kings, and the game remained the same.
That wiretaps allowed them to build a meaningful case against the entire drug organisation, with nearly all the drug dealers in jail or dead or out of the game. That’s not nothing. Without wiretaps they would just have been harassing easily replaced corner pawns.
But what you’re saying is partly true as well. Even after taking whole drug organisations down, it is possible to replace them. As long as the demand existed, and the wholesaler existed, new drug organisations would be formed.
I’m surprised that people came out of it thinking that there was no point to any of the police work. Do you really think it would have been better to not touch the drug organisations in any way?
The whole point of the Wire is how meaningless those wiretaps ended up being.
On either side of the board, the kings stayed the kings, most of the other pieces were chewed up and spit out, a new crop of pieces would come along to replace them, and the game stayed the same.
One would think we'd have learned that lesson a century ago, yet here we are. Until anyone over the legal drinking age can go buy a bottle of Bayer Heroin at CVS, I don't want to hear about how the government is struggling so badly with crime that it thinks my privacy should be on the chopping block.
Also, they caught the drug kingpin at the end of the show by physically following his lieutenants to a warehouse full of drugs and arresting them all on the way out. The only thing the wiretaps were used for was to build a conspiracy charge against the leader, who had been standing outside for months/years doing face to face meetings with everyone that was arrested, clearly being the one in control of every conversation. If somehow that's not enough to charge someone with conspiracy then it seems removing a small amount of freedom to change that would be far preferable to reading everyone's messages and banning encryption.
"The Wire proves the need for mass surveillance" is the dumbest take I've ever heard. It literally shows the complete opposite.