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Comment by betterunix | Hacker News Reader

"Imagine a world where every phone call, email, chat, forum post, etc is fully anonymous or indecipherable to law enforcement. And imagine your loved one has been abducted and law enforcement has no tools for finding those responsible."

So somehow, these abductors managed to leave no physical evidence at all and no witnesses? What does communication privacy have to do with that?

There was once a time in this country when communications could be anonymous -- when law enforcement agencies did not have easy wiretapping access. We still managed to prosecute criminals then. Yes, sometimes criminals got away with their crimes, but that is what striking a balance is all about. The FBI is not trying to strike a balance with this proposal, they are trying to shift the balance in their favor.

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> There was once a time in this country when communications could be anonymous -- when law enforcement agencies did not have easy wiretapping access.

Federal authorities always had wiretapping powers pursuant to a warrant. If you mean before that, it was also a time when limited communications forced more visible means of coordination. Consider the difference between planning a crime in a shady corner of a restaurant, with potential witnesses, versus doing the same in an electronic chat room with no ability to capture the communications, even pursuant to a warrant.

"Consider the difference between planning a crime in a shady corner of a restaurant, with potential witnesses, versus doing the same in an electronic chat room with no ability to capture the communications"

I am not sure I see the difference. On the one hand, you have two people who likely have a legitimate reason to meet at a restaurant speaking quietly to each other. On the other, you have two people with a legitimate reason to have an Internet connection using it to communicate. There is a matter of distance I suppose, but so what? Postal mail has always allowed people to communicate at a distance, and it has always allowed anonymous senders.

Why not require all restaurants to record their customers' conversations, just in case the FBI needs to investigate it later on (with a requirement for a warrant, of course)? The same reasoning applies to this FBI push for expanded wiretapping power.

The difference is that if you plot a crime in a restaurant, there are potentially dozens of sources of evidence linking you to the meeting: patrons and servers might see you, security cameras might record you, people might see you drive there, a credit card bill might link you to a meeting there, etc. If the same crime is planned in a chat room, the only thing police may have to go on is logs hosted by the intermediate service provider. Technology makes the real-time communication more anonymous and less traceable than was practical in the past. Even postal mail, besides not being real-time, isn't as anonymous as electronic communications without the possibility of obtaining logs via a warrant.

The focus of privacy activists is in my opinion misplaced. People want an internet that's never monitored, never recorded, never wire-tappable. That's never going to happen, nor is it apparent that it's desirable. What we want is something that preserves the scope of investigative powers that have historically existed with the telephone system. That means robust protections against warrantless wiretaps, but also an effective way of getting access to information pursuant to court-authorized warrants.

Where does "restaurant" come from? Can conspiracies not be planned in a private residence etc.?

Even with a restaurant, you're relying on someone present giving evidence to law enforcement. That works just the same with encryption -- if you have an encrypted chat room with five people and one of the participants sends the logs to the FBI (or is an undercover agent), the FBI will have the logs. If no one does, the FBI will not, which is the same as it is when co-conspirators meet in a restaurant.

>That means robust protections against warrantless wiretaps, but also an effective way of getting access to information pursuant to court-authorized warrants.

The FBI has plenty of tools available. Even if data is encrypted, law enforcement agents with a warrant would still be able to obtain information from ISPs as to who is communicating and when. In the most serious cases trotted out to justify new powers, the FBI can install a listening device or put a trojan on the suspect's communications device.

The way to strike the right balance here is to make wiretapping extremely technologically difficult but not impossible. That makes it very hard for criminals or anyone without government-level resources, and makes it very difficult for governments to engage in unjustifiable dragnet surveillance of innocent people, while still allowing governments to capture the communications of suspects in the rare and most serious cases where the existing evidence justifies that extraordinary level of invasion into the private communications of citizens.

The FBI can already do this in restaurants. They can ask the owner to tap a table (or set of tables). How many owners do you think would deny this request? This is essentially what the FBI is requesting.

The post office does allow anonymous senders, but not receivers. Mail can be intercepted, although evidence of tampering maybe harder to conceal.

<quote>So somehow, these abductors managed to leave no physical evidence at all and no witnesses?</quote> You are saying that it's impossible to hide your tracks when abducting someone? So, all the successful abductions that occurred were all due to lazy police work?

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