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Comment by crystalmeph | Hacker News Reader

"The question we must ask ourselves is whether, as technology develops, we are content to leave a safe space—a new means of communication—for terrorists to communicate..."

This kind of argument is only a few steps removed from physically placing microphones in private residences. Only to be turned on with a proper warrant, of course.

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No need to discuss it as if it were a hypothetical. We have already done this. Interestingly, the government didn't have to push for it at all; people willingly brought the microphones into their homes on their own. All the government had to do was either convince the companies that make the microphones (and the phones that contain them) to add a backdoor, or find a way to compromise them.

Yes, that is a clever civil-libertarian perspective on the implications of mobile phones, but it doesn't hold up for anyone outside the world of software engineering and security. You can't say people willingly accepted it when normal people don’t think in opsec terms.

No one outside tech circles thinks, upon signing a mobile service contract, "this device could conceivably be turned into a remote bug if the baseband is compromised by a state actor, but I'm willing to accept that trade-off." They think it's secure because it's sold as secure.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not arguing that people willingly accepted mass surveillance within their own homes, or that they somehow deserve it by accepting technology. I'm just saying that the scenario in which there's a microphone in everyone's house that the government can turn on at will is not a hypothetical, it is reality, and furthermore that it's remarkable that the government didn't have to raise a stink or pass oppressive laws or anything of the sort in order to make it happen.

But in that case, you could leave your private residence and whisper to your friend in a microphone-free park. If our goal is to ensure that terrorists have absolutely no means of private communication and we don't know who might be a terrorist, the only viable solution is to ensure that everyone carries their surveillance equipment with them wherever they go. Back-dooring Facebook and Twitter will only drive the terrorists to use services which don't log everything they write and give American corporations unlimited access to their secret plans, so it's either snoop on everyone's body or accept that people are going to find ways to communicate in secret if they really want to.

This makes the big assumption that they actually give a shit about catching terroist's rather than using it as a massive powers land grab.

We already have RIPA which allowed local councils to use anti-terror legislation to investigate parents for school catchment zones (oh and iirc investigations into bins).

Either they want to catch terrorists and haven't thought through the consequences of what they're saying, that people should be denied the right to communicate privately, or they're just using fighting terrorism as a convenient excuse to deny people the right to privacy.

RIPA regulated those councils, and stopped that abuse of law from happening.

> Public bodies have sought to use the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) on nearly three million occasions in the past decade to snoop on people.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8868757/Council...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_Investigatory_Po...

There might be an argument that this assumes that the terrorists are in the same location, which often might not be the case.

Let's say they're not in the same location. They can send encrypted email. It doesn't even have to be email. They can paint an encrypted message on the side of a fleet of commercial airliners and read it out loud during a football broadcast. As long as there's a way to encrypt a message, there's a way to send it to someone who has the decryption key. Demanding that no private communication is available to terrorists requires absolute surveillance.

Of course, some people are going to get sloppy and reveal secrets over the phone or other unencrypted or under-encrypted channels, but that's not the subject at hand. The stated goal was to ensure that terrorists have no means of private communication, which has some pretty awful consequences.

physically placing microphones in private residences

Do you keep your cell phone at your bedside table? Do you have access to your baseband source code? The future is already here.

Imagine if he would have said, "The question we must ask ourselves is whether, as technology develops, we are content to leave a safe space—for people to communicate..."

That's some first class political fearmongering

And I'll keep asking, before the one time cipher was invented, and really - before RSA was invented, what safe space to communicate without the state being able to (if necessary) listen in existed?

I remember the recent controversy about inclusion of google now features in chromium in relation to this. We have mobile phones and other devices like Amazon's Echo that can and do listen to whatever we speak. Although, right now they only transmit the data to cloud after you say the tag phrase like "OK, Google" etc, it doesn't seem hard to make them always on, if the government agencies are given the legal authority to do so.

When are governments going to stop maintaining roads and bridges for terrorists to safely drive on?

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