I like this vein of argument: assume that it is good that the government be able to snoop on your text messages. Why not in-person conversations as well? OK, let's make it so everything you say gets recorded. Eesh.
> Assume that it is good that the government be able to snoop on your text messages. Why not in-person conversations as well?
Playing devil's advocate: in most US states, the FBI can in fact plant someone with a wire to record a private conversation. They don't have the resources to record all in-person conversations, but maybe they would if they could.
Isn’t a warrant required in advance to place the recording device? Many unencrypted messages will be recorded automatically and be retrievable indefinitely.
I don't believe encryption should have intentional backdoors, but more because of the technical impossibility of doing this without introducing security risk. Your analogy doesn't really work, because what governments are arguing they should be able to do is break encryption and snoop only when given a warrant. They can snoop on in-person conversations when they get a warrant and the general public doesn't oppose that, even though they would not want to carry 24/7 recording devices that snooped on every conversation even in the absence of probable cause to be suspected of a criminal conspiracy.
Couldn't they still use their original strategies for spying if they had a warrant? Just get the phone and install a secret microphone inside, or inside a house or a car. This can be done with cameras, too, though the text on a phone might be hard to read.
Yeah... the crux is should electronic conversations be afforded the same rights, and by extension are they assumed rights for all communication? Where to draw the line? It's definitely murky.
It shouldn't be murky at all. For all of the history of humanity, privacy has been the default state. I could talk to people face to face (what used to be the only way) and it was by default private. I could keep written notes and records and they were by default private.
There were special-case mechanisms to violate that privacy (e.g. search warrants, targeted spying) but by their nature they target specific people and, at least most of the time, go through a process with some checks and balances. I don't have any objection to this type of spying. If someone is suspected of a serious crime, it's reasonable for society to have a way to approve planting some surveillance bugs on them and them only.
It's only now that nearly all communication is over third party systems that government suddenly feel it's ok to spy on everyone and all the time. It's clearly not ok, nothing murky about that.
> special-case mechanisms to violate that privacy (e.g. search warrants, targeted spying)… go through a process with some checks and balances. I don't have any objection to this type of spying
I think this is why it’s such a hot issue though. E2E Encryption is a “get out of all surveillance free card.” Even a mildly trained criminal or terrorist can easily guarantee that his communications will never be intercepted. This has never existed before.
I share with people in the pro-Encryption camp the acknowledgments that you can’t un-invent encryption, so you’ll only be catching the most dim-witted criminals by nerfing the mainstream messengers. Anybody can use the ‘OpenSSL” cli to make unbreakable encryption no matter what laws say.
But I also acknowledge how frustrating it is that a truly bad person can simply bypass all the “just” exceptions to privacy, like a search warrant, if they’re even a little savvy.
TL;DR nerfing iMessage (etc) ain’t it, but I can see how non-evil people in law enforcement wish something could be done about the root problem, which is somewhat new.
> E2E Encryption is a “get out of all surveillance free card.”
That's the misdirection the pro-surveillance agencies use but it's not true at all.
People still ultimately exist in meatspace (as it used to be called). If you get a warrant based on legitimate suspicion to follow someone, you can assign detectives to follow them, plant bugs in their home, wire up collaborators and all the endless techniques that were used before the internet was around. People are still people and they walk around in the real world, they can be spied upon.
Sure, it's not as easy as sitting back in the DA office and spying on everyone all day long with zero effort, but it should not be. When the power is given to remove fundamental rights to privacy from someone, it needs to be based on a legitimate process and it must take effort. If it is zero-effort it will be relentlessly abused.
> all the endless techniques that were used before the internet was around
Ok that’s another fallacy though. Before, authorities could get a warrant to wiretap phones and to check the outsides of your envelopes (a “mail cover.”) Only an idiot criminal would ever make a phone call or mail a letter today for anything even remotely related to crime because e2e encrypted calls and chat apps are a thing now, removing lots of risk (nobody can do anything short of getting in the room with one party and peeking over his shoulder, which is not just hard for “lazy” cops, it would be hard for elite international spies). That’s a whole new thing, and a big deal if your job is say, stopping and apprehending human trafficking rings or organized crime.
Again though I’m not saying “and that’s why we should have a back door for cops.” I’m not and we shouldn’t. Just that people who say things have changed in a very impactful way are not being hyperbolic or dishonest.
> Before, authorities could get a warrant to wiretap phones
So basically, before the invention of phones, no criminal was ever caught?
Clearly that's not true. It is entirely possible to follow and spy on people in person and that's how it was always done before the 20th century.
Just because new technologies exist does not justify using them to inifinitely augment surveillance powers of the state.
> a big deal if your job is say, stopping and apprehending human trafficking rings or organized crime
You don't succeed at human trafficking or organized crime if you never leave the house and spend all your day just chatting on signal. You have to actually go out into the real world and do the crimes. As soon as you step out of the house you can be followed and monitored and caught in the act.
These checks and balances are an illusion. They do not work. Courts are overwhelmed with work and suddenly will sign anything. Minimal impact and minimal risk aside for the victim.
An experienced and higher public official will get permission for everything. There is neither a check, nor any balance at all. This is true for every country that pretends surveillance would happen with care.
"The third-party doctrine is a United States legal doctrine that holds that people who voluntarily give information to third parties—such as banks, phone companies, internet service providers (ISPs), and e-mail servers—have "no reasonable expectation of privacy" in that information. A lack of privacy protection allows the United States government to obtain information from third parties without a legal warrant and without otherwise complying with the Fourth Amendment prohibition against search and seizure without probable cause and a judicial search warrant"
... but if you really want true privacy:
"If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself"
-- George Orwell, 1984
By analogy, what if I have multiple pairs of tin cans, where each pair of tin cans is connected by a string, and sell those pairs of cans to people so that they can have private conversations at a distance from one another.
If I provide privately owned physical infrastructure for protecting those strings and facilitating the routing of the strings am I obligated to make that available to the government for eavesdropping?
it isn't murky, it's obvious that it should require a warrant for the government to tap into any conversation that people have a reasonable desire to keep private. The police should be there to serve us and not the other way around.
let's only let those people that absolutely must leave their homes, everyone else should stay inside under government microphone and camera. Imagine how much safe society would be! The government could save so many people like that and keep crime down!
