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Comment by kittikitti | Hacker News Reader

There were many decades where phones didn't have back doors. Now, it's the opposite case in the most dystopian way. It's concerning that all phones are required to have back doors for law enforcement and the enforcement is severe. I know several people who have a corrupt "cop they know" that they can regularly contact for favors. Why is it so out of the ordinary to distrust law enforcement when they have these tools?

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> There were many decades where phones didn't have back doors.

Your cell phone provider almost certainly will respond to a valid warrant and wire tap your non e2e encrypted phone call.

I'd be very surprised if the most common mode of remote communication in any time period was not subject to government interception in some format within a short time of becoming such. That includes physical mail, telegrams, landlines, cell phone calls, txt messages, emails, etc.

Referring to "how things used to be" is not in fact helping the case for privacy.

Of course they will respond to warrants, they have to, and nowadays they have the infrastructure to forward all traffic to law emforcement's servers in real-time.

> and nowadays they have the infrastructure to forward all traffic to law enforcement's servers in real-time.

The goal should be, designing your infrastructure in such a way they simply cannot forward this traffic to law enforcement.

Which is evidently illegal in France.

We're discussing this in regards to an article where the obvious "solution" was found by the government to this very approach. You're free to build it that way and we're free to put you all in jail afterwards as a result. Rubber hose decryption at its finest.

Phone operators are heavily regulated and licensed, and this is a legal requirement and a requirement of their licence. Complying with lawful warrants is also obviously a legal obligatuon.

I don't think people are arguing against complying with valid warrants. They object to blanket surveillance being done with tools available to any law officer that can be used at any time, warrant or not.

You cannot have true e2e encryption on a secure device and comply with a wiretap warrant without a backdoor of some kind somewhere.

Private companies are being used to hoover up massive amounts of data and circumvent legal protections such as warrants.

Before internet on phone, every communication was in plain text, so no need to have a backdoor in phone if you can tap directly into AT&T or Vodafone.

>There were many decades where phones didn't have back doors.

Yeah back then we just listened to the phone calls with scanners.

Do you remember the scene in Goodfellas where the neighborhood's head mobster would only communicate in person with his people?

What are you talking about? Wiretapping with warrant is a century old now.

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