Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

> "Privacy, above all other things, including safety and freedom from terrorism, is not where we want to go," Steinbach said.

It's where I want to go. Also you have YET to show ANY evidence that we are more safe or more free from terrorism by surrounding our rights to privacy.

>He also disputed the "back door" term used by experts to describe such built-in access points. "We're not looking at going through a back door or being nefarious," he argued, saying that the agency wants to be able to access content after going through a judicial process.

You mean "Rubber Stamp Judicial Process"? Even if you didn't the mere fact that these backdoors (you can rename it all your want it's a BACKDOOR) exist make the whole system LESS secure. What a clown and this is the AD of the FBI's Counterterrorism Division??? Fuck....

View on HN

There's nothing in the world that can provide "freedom from terrorism" which makes it even an even uglier lie. Even if it could, I'd still be against it though, because there are many ways to fight terrorism that don't involve sacrificing the freedom our ancestors bought with blood. The FBI needs leadership that understand how to operate within American principles.

Freedom from terrorism is only modern times bogyman. A hundred years ago, it was anarchists! 50 years ago, it was communists. In 50 years into the future, a new fooist will replace terrorists and the same fight will start all over again.

I think what society need is some government reforms that require lawmakers to do cost-benefit analyses with tests and proofs. If they want to ban encryption, they should be forced to provide evidence that it actually work, and that the cost to society is less than current methods to fight terrorism. It would also likely get rid of many current inefficient methods, like security theater at airports.

Proving a policy change's future effects is generally impossible. Congress does have panels of people who write reports on the possible/likely effects of legislation. Not sure how frequently they use them, though.

This. It boggles my mind how scared people are of terrorism, especially domestic terrorism. If you live in Pakistan, where suicide bombings happen all the time, I can understand being scared of terrorism. But in the US? Come on.

You know what I'm scared of? I have to drive two hours four days a week. I am much, much more likely to die in my car. Hell, I was more likely to die in my car while I was in the military. Most people know someone who either got injured or died in a car crash. It happens all the time. How many people know someone who died in a terrorist attack?

But we're surrendering our freedom for the latter, which is a ridiculous phantom bogeyman, while we vigorously defend our right to die on the roadways.

>>> How many people know someone who died in a terrorist attack?

You may not want to pose this question to a New Yorker.

I get your point, but it is a bit of a loaded question.

He asked about people dying in a terrorist attack, not in clandestine government activities.

In support of this, please see September Clues on YouTube.

While we cannot say what exactly happened on 9/11, September Clues proves without a doubt what didn't happen on 9/11.

It may be a loaded question but his point stands, fear is not based on rationality or we would be spending tens of billions of dollars a year trying to prevent car accidents that is currently being spent "fighting terrorism".

NYC population is 8.4M. Auto fatality rate in U.S. is ~12/10,000/year since 2001. If NYC follows US, then ~10k die per year in auto accidents.

The term "loaded question" refers to questions which presume facts. For example, "why did you kill him?" Is loaded because it presumes that you did kill him. The question you are referring to is not loaded.

That's not even remotely close, on either number.

There were 294 motor vehicle fatalities in NYC in 2013.

The US has been averaging about ~32,000 motor vehicle deaths per year the last several years.

Your 12/10000 rate would indicate 360,000 people per year; that's off by a factor of ten.

* http://dmv.ny.gov/statistic/2013nyc.pdf

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in...

I knew a bunch of people who died in the wtc (Lehman), I was one tube behind the one that blew up in London.

I still think the best response to terror is to shrug it off and get on with your life. Spent 7/7 sat at a pub in the sunshine.

Yeah, similar experience here on 7/7 (although I fortuitously walked instead of getting the tube that day, I do know a bunch of people who were close). I wasn't far off the centre of Manchester when they did the Arndale either. All you can do, as you correctly point out, is shrug and carry on.

Auto accidents don't make the government look like they fell asleep on the job like 9-11 did.

I was stuck in Boston airport for 6+ hours yesterday. The TVs at my gate were tuned to CNN endlessly discussing various terror topics, including some antagonist (Pamela Gellar) ranting.

That entire section of the airport (and I imagine many homes tuned to the same station) were absolutely saturated with a message of fear and us-vs-them. I think it's ridiculous, but I can easily see how for many people this is a pervasive issue. It might be the majority of the media they consume, in that they don't seek out much else or tune out the 24-hour media cycle or fearmongering or ratings attempts.

Agreed, people need to find their balls and stop giving into fear.

Statistically in the US a person is more likely to be shot by the police than killed by terrorists.

Much, much more likely to die in a car crash, but you can't justify militarising your state in the name of traffic safety.

Even with high-profile, high-fear factor, violent events we're highly selective about what we freak out about. Last year a military installation shot down a commercial airplane, killing nearly 300 people. No military solution called for, no drastic measures taken, commercial flights are still flying over war zones today.

Why do we believe we should/could do something about all foreign and domestic crazy people (so called 'lone wolfs' like at Boston) and all crazy and motivated groups who hate the US because of our foreign policy in their region (and there are plenty of regions with negative perspectives) when we can't even prevent state actors from killing civilians?

> In 50 years into the future, a new fooist will replace terrorists and the same fight will start all over again.

Cryptoists. Or maybe I'm overly optimistic thinking crypto-users will first be targetted in 50 years time. Probably more like 5? Maybe 10?

The question I want to ask is, looking at the history of human society (especially in the 20th century), is it more reasonable to fear terrorists or totalitarian governments? Just in terms of absolute numbers of people killed, it seems that the latter wins by orders of magnitude [1,2,3,etc]. So assuming we want to prevent death and hardship (the precise reason this guy wants to restrict encryption), we should be focused on preventing the rise of totalitarianism. That means we should be extremely wary of all of this surveillance infrastructure that's springing up everywhere, and of any calls to make our communications even less secure than they already are. It's not that today's government is totalitarian or even has those tendencies, it's that we're making it easier for it to happen in the future, and that's a real danger in my opinion.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#Calculating_the_...

Hell, they just need to watch Star Wars.

the more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers

It's like they just don't understand causality, at all.

If we aren't willing to ban alcohol even though it is a major factor in many accidents, deaths, murders, domestic abuse cases, child abuse cases, and rapes... then why should we ban something that would help stop a far less dangerous problem?

Theyre tired of having to break laws to do their job. They want to spy on us and they want us to not only accept it but appreciate and like it. If you make it socially acceptable it will never be challenged again.

They'll chisel away at the protection laws piece by piece until they get what they want. I sometimes feel that we're screwed no matter how hard we try to fight.

Maybe not. If there is a force as strong as parts of government, it's other parts of government. Intelligence community is its own kingdom, with its own goals, but other areas of government run on a four year cycle and depend on public support. So if people will want restrictions in surveillance badly enough, politicians' pathetic pandering to public opinion could create a very powerful counter force.

Roller coaster. Everythings a roller coaster. We will win for a few years, they will win for a few years, then back to us. You'll have long stretches where we win (golden age) and back to them winning for a long period (dark age), but it will always bounce back one way or the other.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age is a good article (obviously) covering this philosophy...

All you can really do is try to increase the worth of what you leave behind to your future progeny so that in times of dark ages they are high in the council but remain moral, and in the golden ages they use science to create awesome things and ignore hysteria and FUD. Unfortunately too much shift one way or the other in a genealogy tree makes the family lazy or a war mongrel so it's hard to pull off.

They will try to chisel away at rights (with some success), but if you think about what they are up against, they will always be playing wack-a-mole.

No matter how good the surveillance teams are, they will never completely control humanity nor know everything at all times. They simply aren't capable of it.

In addition, the wants are limitless but their budgets are constrained by what they can reasonably appropriate. As they make it harder to do business (by introducing security holes or ruining trust) the amount they can appropriate becomes less.

In addition, they become buried by an ever increasing amount of information that their inefficiency can't handle. I have no doubt some of the best and brightest in the world work for for secret agencies. But operationally they are still bureaucracies. Thus, they have no shortage of lazy and stupid people... many of whom are in leadership positions. In fact I believe these pleas for unconstitutional shortcut tools are the pleas of lazy and unimaginative people. People who don't want to be found probably have much more reason to worry if the special pleading ever stops. Because at that point there may be truly more competent people running the program.

12 years ago the US government employed convicted felon Adm. John Poindexter to promote the "Total Information Awareness" program, which crashed and burned upon being revealed to the public, but as we've seen in the intervening years the government decided to just go ahead with it anyway.

Privacy, in the context of the government, also means freedom to be left alone. I think that's quite an important freedom to have.

We really need to make stronger arguments for privacy. Too many people conflate real privacy (which I believe virtually nobody actually wants to give away, if they truly understand what giving it away means) with "sharing stuff on Facebook and Instagram".

One is an obvious choice, and the other (the government, or even companies through non-transparent trackers, knowing everything about you) is not, but is forced upon you.

>show ANY evidence that we are more safe or more free from terrorism by surrounding our rights to privacy

Wasn't FBI surveillance a thing during the Boston bombing? Since 9/11 have any attacks been prevented? If surveillance was a tool to prevent these attacks, why wasn't the surveillance authority (FBI) held directly responsible for the attacks?

Anyone who would advocate surveillance would first need to be criminally prosecuted for the Boston bombing because at the time they had the information and ignored it. With-holding information from the law about crime or potential crimes is illegal.

Surveillance was used, however, to identify and track the Boston Bombers, leading to death and capture, and parallel construction was used to create an unstoppable court case, leading to imprisonment and death sentencing.

But you are right - these tools are not used merely to detect and stop terrorist activity. It is also used to track and stop ideas, to give leads and to give extremely powerful intelligence to the FBI, CIA, DIA, NCTC, etc whenever it is needed for some purpose. To those in power these capabilities are extremely powerful.

The existence of these powers does not mean that they will be abused on a systematic level - though of course the potential is always there. One danger is that America's fight to remain relevant in a world that may be moving past it, it may turn ever more Fascistic. In this case, these are powers that would be extremely dangerous for the government to have.

But take a step back to think about this. As citizens we are worried about the use of these capabilities to thwart the public. They are so powerful and so complete that we fear being subjects of its application - viscerally.

To the extent that the good will and checks and balances have worked to keep the brunt of these capabilities aimed outside US borders there are people who do fear, and deserve to fear, the wrath of the US government - even those who might otherwise be innocents, bystanders, or casualties of the struggle for power.

My heart goes out to these people stuck in the middle and it beats faster at the thought of being one myself.

"Surveillance", if you count confiscated video footage from the crime scenes, may have been used to identify, but not to track.

Tamerlan died in a shootout after a police officer in Watertown noticed the stolen SUV and called it in. [edit: note there was some tracking of the hijacked SUV due to the owner's cooperation, but that's targeted tracking with cooperation, and not of the brothers themselves]

Tsarnaev was apprehended after an ordinary citizen noticed someone hiding on his boat and called it in.

The massive manhunt, whatever the intelligence apparatus contributed, the shutting down of Boston and suburbs... all accomplished pretty much nothing, other than conditioning people to get used to martial law, and an excuse to point guns at people[1] to cow them into submission.

And what evidence at trial was unlikely to have been available except by parallel construction? The defense strategy was to admit the acts but argue he was brainwashed by his brother and shouldn't receive a death sentence.

[1] https://ajmacdonaldjr.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/martial-la...

Did they not track the brothers with their cell phones?

The hijacked ML350 was tracked, allegedly, but not with broad surveillance powers. They were able to track it after the driver escaped, because he cooperated, had left his iphone in the vehicle, and the vehicle had satellite navigation.

> Since 9/11 have any attacks been prevented?

Lots of attacks have been claimed to have been prevented, though in many cases when the details for several of them came out they were attacks that may have been discussed but weren't particularly likely to have been executed, and/or plots that were largely driven by government agents.

Well, there's plenty of people who have been goaded by the FBI into a mock attack who have been stopped from carrying out those mock attacks.

I know, that doesn't count and if anything it's basically entrapment, but hey... we have to justify the budget somehow.

Actually, I like this strategy and it probably works. It's a good strategy against pirated software too. If 90% of terrorist suppliers are really cia entrappers, terrorists are going to have a hard time coordinating anything that requires resources beyond 1 person. Entrapment requires lying. And if you have ready decided to lie to your own people, may as well use its full evil power on the adversary.

If you're justifying your program by spending its resources trying to goad people with mental handicaps and other lowest common denominator people into committing terrorism, what have you accomplished?

Any organization with a degree of security, one a nation would consider an adversary, is aware of the dangers agents pose with infiltration.

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/3/19/how_the_fbi_created_a_...

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/12/08/249610501/...

> It's where I want to go. Also you have YET to show ANY evidence that we are more safe or more free from terrorism by surrounding our rights to privacy.

If they could show that, credible evidence would have presented by now. ;)

But in all seriousness, the 1st & 4th amendment protections are the most vital freedoms we have and they should not be abridged outside of a direct link to harm. [e.g. Things like child porn, words designed to incite violent harm, violent prisoners shouldn't have privacy ]

So you have to be rational about it but yeah, mass surveillance and reducing self-defense tools to protect ourselves against criminals isn't "rational" behavior.

Criminals are going to do illegal things and we have the right to protect ourselves. If it inconvenience the government? So be it. I'm not going to bend over for any criminal who wants access to my financial data "because Terrorism".

Similarly, banning tools of self-defense [e.g. encryption for financial data, access keys] are simply guaranteeing the criminals will be the only ones to possess them.

I'm aware alot of people will be like "what about the 2nd"??

Yeah, that provides no protection against the government since they'll always have the ability to drop bombs on you. When you can afford a F-16 and the ability to pilot it for "self defense" purposes, let me know.

You cannot fight against an evil government with the 2nd amendment, but you can definitely resist it. An unarmed population is totally helpless, meanwhile.

What's the difference between fighting against an evil government and resisting it with arms?

Actually trying to take on the military, vs resistance (sabotage and only fighting if absolutely necessary). Guns are still helpful for the latter.

Wouldn't the first act of an evil government be to outlaw civilian armaments and confiscate these guns? At that point, you'd be forced to either go to war(which you agree you would lose), or lose your weaponry. Perhaps the proliferation of guns would help the now criminal resistance acquire an arsenal, but I'm skeptical. European history is rife with examples of armed resistance forming from an unarmed populace.

I wouldn't call my ancestors 'helpless' considering their multiple armed rebellions and constant resistance after being conquered, or examples I'm less acutely aware of like the French or Polish resistance during WW2. It's also worth noting that while this resistance was very much detrimental to the hostile government, it was never the primary factor of its downfall.

> "Wouldn't the first act of an evil government be to outlaw civilian armaments and confiscate these guns?"

And now you know why gun registry laws regularly get torpedoed.

Hard to round up all the guns if you don't actually know who has what.

> Wouldn't the first act of an evil government be to outlaw civilian armaments and confiscate these guns?

Historically this is exactly what happens.

Proponents of gun registries know this, want this. People who value their freedom have to fight a (so far, winning) battle to maintain their Constitutionally-protected rights.

If it comes to that, whether there's a legal right to have said guns is pretty much moot, because the people you're using those guns to resist aren't going to respect that right. If you're prepared to fight your government, you don't care whether it's allowing you to have the means to fight it.

Therefore the right to bear arms as a defense against tyranny is mostly empty words. The way to prevent tyranny is robust public institutions and a democratic culture. Weakly democratic states fall to autocrats all the time. There is no culture of democracy so the number of power holders a would-be autocrat has to cow is few. Democracy, real democracy, involves orders of magnitude more people, it's that much more difficult to overthrow.

Easier to already have a gun from when they were allowed, then to acquire a gun after they were banned.

Of course the later would never be hard in America, considering just how many guns there are that would not get swept up... But the first is still easier.

That's just wrong. Look at this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_revolutions_and_rebelli.... The unarmed revolutions (including some civil unrest but no large-scale deployment of firearms) are plenty and more successful than the alternative, which usually ends in a civil war.

And how many of those revolutions were against the homeland of a group that spends nearly $700 billion a year on defense? These are completely different circumstances.

Is it? Suppose the entire population refused to pay taxes.

People who make that argument about the second amendment always seem to forget that the U.S. military has been getting its ass kicked for more than a decade now by people mostly armed with Toyota pickups, AK-47s and IEDs.

Oh that's cute. The U.S. has essentially upgraded its military forces and gets to beta test it in the deserts of the middle east. Did you think 'Winning the hearts and minds of the people' was an actual mission? And the U.S. pulling that off while only losing ~5K troops just furthers how laughable your statement was

Ya, but the war on drugs has been a resounding success...oh, wait....

> People who make that argument about the second amendment always seem to forget that the U.S. military has been getting its ass kicked for more than a decade now by people mostly armed with Toyota pickups, AK-47s and IEDs.

People who make that argument seem to forget that if you decide to rebel, the 2nd amendment doesn't matter because you are a criminal and can bring guns over the border through Mexico or via other channels. The same is true of IEDs.

The "people" with AK-47s aren't getting them legally as common citizens.

That doesn't change the fact the majority of the US isn't going to rebel and that such "rebellions" in the US tend to look like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre

Self-defense is an interesting approach to privacy.

So far, we've been treating encryption as a matter of privacy (Fourth Amendment). But since the U.S. government has historically treated encryption as a weapon, perhaps we could also argue that encryption is a matter of the Second Amendment. It would be really interesting to get the NRA, Rand Paul, and Bernie Sanders to speak out in favor of encryption at the same time...

Of course, the flip side of this approach is that it's much easier to support restrictions on the possession, use, and export of weapons. "Export-grade" ciphers are still causing issues 20 years later.

And just for the hell of it, let's throw in the (nearly-never cited) 3rd Amendment.

It "places restrictions on the quartering of soldiers in private homes without the owner's consent". This explicitly was to prevent citizens from having to bear the capital costs associated with the government's own decisions, but it also appears to have been borne out of a fear of having a government agent be able to observe one's most private affairs.

For better or worse, the 3rd amendment doesn't come with the precedents of the 2nd or 4th. There is an argument to be made that by having a General of the US Military capable of monitoring me while sitting on my couch (in a realistic scenario via my cell phone or Xbone), that the military is overstepping its constitutional bounds with respect to my privacy. This would not apply so much to the FBI, but it might eventually were precedent to be pushed in the correct direction.

The part about "prevent[ing] citizens from having to bear the capital costs associated with the government's own decisions" is also interesting.

It could mean that if the Feds want to make their own jobs easier by trespassing on the private property (laptops, phones, etc.) of citizens, they'll have to get the owner's permission first.

Now that we've successfully reinterpreted the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Amendments to support privacy, why not the 1st Amendment? Would you like to join the Church of Privacy and accept Ed Snowden as your Lord and Savior? According to our Holy Book, in order to reach salvation, you must vigorously resist the Devil's attempts to spy on your life. Oh, and the 5th already gives you the right to refuse to divulge encryption keys, at least on some interpretations.

> ability to drop bombs on you

People in mud huts in Afghanistan don't seem to be having trouble waging guerrilla warfare against the most powerful (and expensive) military on the planet.

F-16s don't occupy territory. F-16s don't police thoughts.

This "they have tanks, planes, and bombs, so your rights don't matter anyway- you don't need them" bullshit is a farce:

People police people. People occupy territory.

It would just so happen that people are exceptionally susceptible to small arms fire.

Sounds like this dude works for Her Majesty's Secret Service, not the USA. He should be fired for this.

Nah. He's just nostalgic for the pre-Internet days when the FBI could listen on anyone's communications because phone companies were legally required to make their lines tappable.

They make going dark seem like some terrible unprecedented thing but electronic communication hasn't even been ubiquitous for that long. Before that there were no wire taps because there were no wires. The human race somehow managed to survive.

It's important to note that part of the reason they "need" technology to track terrorism is that technology enables terrorism. To say that we got along fine before technology and mass surveillance means we don't need mass surveillance is a flawed argument; it misses the fact that technology brings with it a big bag troubles and benefits.

But personally, I still think window of abuse for back doors is too large to be rationally allowed.

I wonder how we'll deal with this as technology progresses even further. In 10-20 years, it probably won't take much for a random nutjob to make an extremely deadly virus. And that are only baby steps in nanotechnology. Do we really want total privacy and anonymity in a world where a single person can easily wield such destructive powers?

Are you saying that because someone might do something evil, we should all lose our right to privacy and anonymity to protect everyone from what the mad scientist might do?

Can you even show that taking my privacy away makes me markedly safer, because unless you can establish that first I'm not even listening.

That's not a world I want to live in thanks.

I would wager that a substantial number (probably majority) of individuals on this site (SF/NYC dwellers, especially) would trade their right (Ok: not really, but everyone elses) to keep and bear arms for a bit of (false) security.

A bit of malfeasance: nobody gets any rights.

How much money do you have in the bank, and what is your bank account number? If anything can be hidden in the internet, then who decides which things can be hidden?

I can show you my balance and even give you the number in case you're so nice as to transfer me something. And I'll live happy knowing that if you try doing something funny, you can be tracked down and held responsible.

Sure.. tell that to some of the unscrupulous people in Nigeria and Russia that run a lot of the scams that don't seem to be held responsible at all.

Yes, because giving up privacy and anonymity will only marginally slow down (if at all) the would be evildoers, at least those smart enough to not brag about their evil doings in Facebook.

In my home country, we have one of the more strict gun owning laws in the world. That does not prevent the criminals from getting guns at all - pretty much every random fucker can get his hand on a pistol, and organized gangs have gear that is often comparable with that of the army. But, on the other hand, it is pretty difficult for the average law abiding citizen to arm themselves for self protection.

The funny thing is, this strict control got really started in the late 60's and 70's, when student riots made for a moment seem like a coupe / civil war against the regime were at least thinkable. So, what are the real winners when the government outlaws technologies than short the gap between state power vs individual powers? It is not the criminal elements in society. They already are breaking the law and profiting from it. They will work around whatever restrictions get imposed and illegally import the gear they need from wherever it is available. It is you and me who get the shaft!

The point of gun control isn't to keep the guns from the hands of real criminals (much less gangs), it's to keep guns from the average not-really-law-abiding citizen, who gets drunk and shoots his ex-wife, or leaves his gun accessible to his kids (hello school shootings) or just gets mad at his boss (just happened around here, the guy had a hunting rifle).

Whether that justifies preventing people from arming themselves for self-defense is arguable, of course.

Not sure why you are being down-voted. This is spot on.

The point of gun control is to score points with some parts of the population while disarming the rest--anything else is just grandstanding used to justify the act.

Yes, that's the motivation for politicians; I'm talking about the reasons why it scores them some points.

> The point of gun control isn't to keep the guns from the hands of real criminals (much less gangs)

Ah, so there we have it.

> it's to keep guns from the average not-really-law-abiding citizen

So guilty until proven innocent.

> Whether that justifies preventing people from arming themselves for self-defense is arguable, of course

I guess it's a great thing we have the Second Amendment and associated judicial proceedings.

Heller v. DC further enshrined the individual right to keep and bear arms. Specifically, semi-automatic handguns.

Stare decisis.

So guilty until proven innocent.

Nonsense. A general restriction is not the same as declaring everyone guilty. Am I being declared guilty until proven innocent by not being allowed to own military weaponry? Nuclear weapons? Biological agents?

This doesn't mean the restrictions are OK in this case; as I wrote, it's arguable*

I guess it's a great thing we have the Second Amendment and associated judicial proceedings.

Whatever makes you happy. Not being from the US, my interest is purely academic. Our constitution has no such provision, and the population is under no urge to add it.

At risk of going extremely off-topic, let me ask.

Are you saying that because there are idiots who drink and drive, all cars should be banned. But if there end up being criminals with cars that get away from the police on bikes... then it is somehow alright because it was never a goal to stop them in the first place?

I guess I feel even more strongly against letting a dumb law enforcement agency dictate what infosec is ok to have on my systems, thank you very much!

[Edit] Ok, I can see my argument was kind of dumb, comparing regulation with outright banning.

Frankly, thugs with guns are irrelevant. I'm not advocating to drop all privacy because there are some bad guys with ill intent, who may want to hurt you or me - as a society we've already decided it's not a big deal (otherwise you'd have much more resources poured into crime prevention). The question I'm asking is - in the quickly coming age of easily obtainable weapons of mass destruction, does the privacy arguments change? And how do you want to secure people from random evildoers utilizing such weapons? It's a genuine concern, and in case you think I'm just fearmongering, I suggest checking out the progress happening in biotechnology.

It was not my intention to fear monger. I was speaking by analogy, not sure if it was not clear or if you disagree with my argument.

What I am saying is this: in a world where weapons of mass destruction becomes more available, privacy/anonymity is mostly a non issue. I will say it outfront: I am skeptical of the evil genius in a basement, holding a day job while secretly moonlighting on his personal armageddon. Players willing and able to conduct this type of terrorist attacks will probably not rely on the same IT stack regular joes do.

Assuming they have the financial resources and personnel to pose a credible threat will know to not use their iphones. They will know to use vintage hardware, to download and compile their own Linux/OpenBSD from scratch, to get their crypto libraries from "rouge" countries outside of the sphere of influence of the US, etc. Those that do not, they will be busted early.

Those that pose the real threat then are the ones that you cannot stop by making technology harder to get. As long as there is demand, there will be supply. And they will have gear that is in the same ballpark as the forces that are supposed to stop them. Probably not as good as the best there is, because you can never outspend the guy with the printing press, but good enough to hold their own.

And then there is the cost. Not only the conspiracy theory cost that the government is going to turn fascist, but the very real cost of giving real criminals an edge over the public. They already are breaking the law, they wont care about using banned technology. If they can afford it, and if they can either profit from it or avoid being caught using it, they will get it in the black market.

You were not fearmongering; I was preempting in case someone accused me of doing so ;).

I agree with your analysis if applied to contemporary dangers. But I've been not-so-subtly hinting towards biotech for a reason - as it progresses and the "tools of the trade" become both cheap and possible to DIY, the "required financial resources and personnel" drop sharply. People brewing up dangerous viruses ten years from now in universities or hackerspaces, whether on purpose or by accident, don't seem like a big stretch of imagination. And I honestly wonder, how are we, as a society, planning to safeguard ourselves against that threats. We can barely handle the diseases that occur naturally. People don't realize how dangerous this stuff is, because - again, except from natural diseases - we've never had to deal with a self-replicating technology before.

I'm not saying we'll need to drop privacy and anonymity entirely, but I suspect that they will be affected by any good solution. I'd probably sleep safer if I knew that there's no easy way to anonymously obtain necessary ingredients. You'll never stop a very determined attacker, but they're not the problem - random nutjobs with an axe to grind are.

> I'd probably sleep safer if I knew that there's no easy way to anonymously obtain necessary ingredients

That is already the case for a lot of things, when it comes to chemistry anyway. Your random person couldn't get their hands on the things required to make various dangerous chemicals. Criminals, they can, sometimes, but with great effort and expense so it's usually aimed at chemicals that will make them money (drugs, typically) -- and the really advanced stuff is done by "legit" (kind of) labs, not a home chemist.

Of course, that's only as good as the stores following the protocols, and with the internet that can change somewhat, but even then it requires buying chemicals outside of the country and getting it through customs (which isn't perfect, but puts up enough of a barrier that regular people or average criminals don't risk it).

A.k.a. "All people should be considered guilty until proven innocent."

Your advocacy of such a practice under such dubious rationale indicates - to me at least - that you don't really understand American principles.

> A.k.a. "All people should be considered guilty until proven innocent."

Not really. Please re-read the comment I replied to. The point is, progress of technology brings new dangers and appropriate means of protection need to be created.

And by "protection", you seem to mean "watch everyone because everyone's a potential criminal".

My point stands.

If anything, "watch everyone to have enough data available to be able to spot a criminal before he strikes". But my point actually is, some amount of watching will always be necessary, and advancements of technology seem to increase the need for that surveillance as the time goes.

> If anything, "watch everyone to have enough data available to be able to spot a criminal before he strikes".

A.k.a. "assume everyone is a criminal".

> But my point actually is, some amount of watching will always be necessary

Sure, if there's reasonable suspicion that the person being watched is a criminal, and there's a real warrant (not some rubber-stamp from FISA) authorizing said watching. Watching everyone because "well we don't know if this person's a criminal or not" is not only ineffective (as proven by the dearth of terrorist attacks actually prevented due to NSA surveillance) but unethical and - per the United States Constitution - illegal.

Of course, none of this would be an issue if law-abiding citizens were encouraged and given the resources to protect themselves against crime, be it physical (by practicing self-defense, armed or otherwise) or virtual (by encouraging the use of free/open software, and strong encryption).

That's a pretty extreme speculation. There has been only one non-state-actor use of WMDs, ever: The Aum cult sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. They could have done more damage with a simple bomb.

Actually two; the guys did a sarin attack twice. But I'm not worried about chemical weapons; they're not that dangerous. What worries me is biological attacks, which differ by having a self-replicating component that can amplify even the tiniest exposure to an international emergency.

Governments going completely insane on their people are relatively common. Everyone thinks it will not happen to them, until it does. That's a much greater risk than rogue individuals. To double the big risk to half the small one is bad risk management.

I agree if you express it not in terms of probability of event (rouge individuals pop up every day somewhere) but expected damage. There is only so much one man can do today, so it's right to focus on big risks and not small ones. But technology tends to change things, and I fear that upcoming biotech (and possibly pure nanotech in more distant future) will drastically change the equation, giving unprecedented power to rouge individuals with ill intent. The question is, how can we defend from that; how can we minimize the amount of damage one person can do?

How about traditional police investigation tactics? They have been and continue to be extremely effective, much more so than blanket comms survalience. If you compare today to a few hundred years ago, we've already expeeienced the kind of change in destructive access you fear, and yet it almost never happens.

if someone makes an extremely deadly virus, id much rather we have spent the money investing in a cure than trying to track down who made it.

The point is, you may want that money to be spent stopping that someone before he makes / releases it, and that seems to be at odds with privacy concerns.

the point still stands. if we were to invest in cures then someone making a weapon would be a moot point because their weapon wouldnt do anything.

Swinging to the other side, would you really want to allow an alphabet soup agency to make a virus or nanotech (a literal "bug") to infiltrate your body and monitor everything going on with you on the off chance that some nutjob does the same thing?

Honestly? Yes. Already some way to artificially boost the immune system would be a good thing, and in a world with advanced nano/biotech available this seems like a no-brainer. We need some sort of blanket protection not only from potential attackers, but from much more likely accidents.

Yes. Always.

What about American "terrorists" who organized in secret to fight for independence from the British?

i don't see how that argument makes sense. Yeah there were no wire taps, but there also weren't any wires for criminals to use to communicate. Criminal investigators have histroically been able to get at any place where there might be evidence, with a warrant. The historical maxim has been "the law is entitled to every man's evidence." You could put a lock on your desk drawer, but that can be easily bypassed with a warrant. There is protection against warrantless searches, but once due process is given, a court's power to compel the disclosure of evidence is almost unlimited.

An encrypted hard drive is a totally unprecedented thing in that regard.

> An encrypted hard drive is a totally unprecedented thing in that regard.

Then governments with enumerated powers would need some unprecedented powers to get into that unprecedented thing, right?

> Then governments with enumerated powers would need some unprecedented powers to get into that unprecedented thing, right?

Only the federal government is limited to its enumerated powers. So at best your argument is that mandating backdoors requires state rather than federal action. State governments can do whatever they want unless it conflicts with a Constitutional right, and there is no right to have a place to stash evidence the government can't get to with adequate process.

Sometimes human memory is such a place under the fifth amendment.

The contents of your human memory are not protected as a general principle. For example, you can be compelled to testify against someone else. You can't be compelled to testify against yourself, but the premise of that protection isn't some general right not to disclose the contents of your memory, but a very specific right against forced confessions.

> and there is no right to have a place to stash evidence the government can't get to with adequate process

Enumerated powers of government. Unenumerated rights of the people.

All that means is that you don't have to point to the Constitution to prove a right exists. The right still has to exist somewhere and be recognized.[1] The power of courts to access nearly all evidence with due process predates the Constitution and nothing about that document shows any intention to alter that practice.

[1] "Rights" are exceptions, not the rule. The rule is the will of democratically elected legislatures. Rights are exceptions to democracy and should be construed to swallow the rule.

Rights are expansive. There is no "precautionary principle" when it comes to rights. If a new thing is discovered, like strong encryption, I have a right to use it in conjunction with my other rights. If I can make a cheap personal rocket, I have a right to launch myself into orbit, as long as I'm not infringing on others' rights. The fact that such a rocket means anyone can build an ICBM doesn't put it outside of one's rights.

Governments have no inherent power to "inspect." You seem to think governments should have superior powers to individuals. While there is a philosophical argument for this, that doesn't mean it's always going to be true.

If code is speech, so is strong encryption.

It's fallacious to use the concept of "enumerated powers" and "limited government" to argue that "rights" in the U.S. are, or were intended to be, structured the way you describe. "Limited government" concerns the allocation of power between the state and federal governments, not the relationship between those governments and individuals.

State governments are not ones of enumerated powers and they are not limited. They are successors to the British Parliament and inherited the powers of that institution including the general police power. Against that backdrop, "rights" are those specific restrictions on the exercise of that power that states have bound themselves to by the federal Constitution and their own constitutions. There is no room in that framework for an expansive conception of rights that all exist so long as you're "not infringing on others' rights."

A great concrete example is blue laws, which were widespread at the time of the founding and regulated everything from alcohol sales to food consumption. Some of those have been challenged, hundreds of years later and mostly unsuccessfully, on establishment clause grounds, but there is little doubt the states, as a general principle, have the right to regulate public morals.

> there is little doubt the states, as a general principle, have the right to regulate public morals.

You must have a pretty rigorous definition of "public morals." I'd like to hear one that isn't a novelty, that accommodates gay marriage.

But this has already happened and the judge in question 'compelled' the suspect to decrypt her laptop. I don't know if she ever did, whether there was any evidence that was germane to the case on it or whether she was held indefinitely but there is recourse for the authorities in these cases.

http://www.cnet.com/news/judge-americans-can-be-forced-to-de...

Eventually her husband provided the cops with the correct password[1]. The 5th Amendment prevents you from providing testimony that would incriminate yourself. In this case, though, she was being compelled to decrypt the laptop to produce evidence against someone else - Ms. Fricosu was granted immunity against any evidence collected from the laptop[2], so she didn't have any 5th Amendment grounds. In general, a Grand Jury has the right to subpoena any evidence from a third party that is relevant to a criminal investigation, and you can be held in contempt if you don't produce it. She had already admitted in a wiretapped conversation that there were documents relevant to the case on the laptop, the laptop was in her possession and that she refused to give them the passwords.

[1] http://www.denverpost.com/ci_20080656

[2] http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2012/01/decryp... (p.9)

The use of crypto for information security predates the United States. It wasn't very good crypto back then, but it was around. People also had other ways to obscure information from the government: shorthands, code books, code phrases, foreign languages, argots, and cants (and physical seals, to discourage tampering with mail).

Indeed, I've found the infiltration of monarchical type behaviour to be surprisingly prevalent in the modern US oligarchical elite structure. I think people have forgotten that, throughout most of the history of our country the UK and EU oligarchy/aristocracy/monarchy have been the enemy of the US, and in the beltway rush to power many of them have become infatuated with the trappings of neo-feudalism, all without even realizing the magnitude of their error.

Make no mistake about it, the idea of national sovereignty worldwide is under attack, including the United States of America's, but no one really wants to admit or even entertain ideas of whom it might be, lest the truth be too upending.

What have ended up is a modern day star chamber.

"Finding its support from the king’s prerogative (sovereign power and privileges) and not bound by the common law, Star Chamber’s procedures gave it considerable advantages over the ordinary courts. It was less bound by rigid form; it did not depend upon juries either for indictment or for verdict; it could act upon the petition of an individual complainant or upon information received; it could put an accused person on oath to answer the petitioner’s bill and reply to detailed questions. On the other hand, its methods lacked the safeguards that common-law procedures provided for the liberty of the subject.” –Encyclopedia Britannica

> by surrounding our rights

I think you meant surrendering, or did you really meant encircling? Not a native speaker, just trying to get a better grasp of the language.

i think, if he meant surrounding, he'd have needed to use "with" or "in". "surrounding our rights with privacy" (which is grammatically correct but doesn't really make sense in this context).

so yes, surrendering is a safe guess.

I didn't even notice the error, my brain just registered that as 'surrendering.' I'm positive that's what was meant.

I meant "surrendering" sorry, I JUST noticed this typo and went looking for the person who would point it out, thanks! Sorry for confusing you on an already confusing/inconsistent language.

> "Privacy, above all other things, including safety and freedom from terrorism, is not where we want to go," Steinbach said.

That's called a "Cognitive Distortion": Polarized Thinking (or “Black and White” Thinking).

We don't have to choose between either privacy or safety !

wow your second quote is hilarious. "We're not looking at going through a back door! We just want to access the content". it means the speaker was using that metaphor visually, and didn't know that the word backdoor doesn't really have that kind of a physical meaning. (You can tell the speaker has it wrong because they say, "going through a back door" - I just notice even the word 'back door' is written with a space whereas in computing we write it closed (joined) - https://www.google.com/search?q=wikipedia+back+door)

I honestly think the qualifications for high-ranking national security folks in the United States includes things like "played with G.I. Joes a lot as a kid." These people are almost caricatures.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com