Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

You have to trust something though. There are people out to get you - maybe not you personally, but there are evil people. We need to handle criminals, letting them go free isn't not a good answer.

You seem to be saying that letting them go free is the best answer we have. This may be correct - it is something we as society need to debate in great depth. However it still isn't a good answer.

View on HN

Yes, we should be willing to accept a certain level of crime if it means privacy and security for hundreds of millions of regular people. Even more so when their cure is worse than the disease.

Note that other threads in this post have said "with a warrant" which is different from general lack of privacy. These are things we need to debate as a society and it means understanding details not making two sentences on a discussion board with less than 15 minutes of thought... (I of course have no idea how much thought you may have put into this before this topic came up, I only see the time stamps on our comments... This is why I hate debates - you don't have time to make a well thought response to something new and so you can lose to a bad idea if you don't come up with the right counter)

> Note that other threads in this post have said "with a warrant"

I think there's some confusion and people talking past each other there.

With a warrant, LE can extract messages from devices, request and receive data dumps from service providers, and attempt to crack encrypted data. In many places they can also insert backdoors (server or client side) with a warrant. We see some people pointing this out as being sufficient.

This is different from every device and citizen (except politicians) preemtively having their devices backdoored with access granted after a warrant (which you seem to be arguing for). Most of us agree that this is unacceptable and is already unconstitutional in several EU countries.

We would need massive improvement of these mechanisms with secondary audits to even consider that. Because in reality these mechanisms are broken as well. Fixing that first is a necessary requirement.

Currently there is simply no capacity for warrants to be seriously vetted. Hence they become arbitrary.

If everyone cooperates, you can catch more criminals, but if you force them to cooperate, that's authoritarianism.

"Why don't you want a government camera implanted in your eyeballs? Do you want to let criminals go free?"

I don't understand where the obligation to trust something, aside from the intended recipient, with my private communications comes from. It seems to me there is no such obligation and giving into surveillance is not a requirement, but a choice, and a poor one in my opinion.

What kind of boogiemen do you mean?

There are hundreds of options. Some are imaginary, some are very real. The real ones often feel imaginary until they affect you (or someone close to you) and suddenly you realize how real they are.

I agree but can you name some? As justification for surveillance like this?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com