Somebody doxx this prick already.
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A search warrant allows the government to search things that belong to you, such as your home, your papers, your locked safe, etc.
A warrant doesnât require you to open your safe, or make your safe easy to open. That would defeat the purpose of the safe. It grants the right for the authorities to force the safe. The point is, I think, the government has no business telling people they can only make shitty safes for their convenience. There are far more legitimate uses for a safe than illegitimate.
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Safes buy time. Safes are not unbreakable or uncrackable, and this goes doubly for safes that an individual is likely to have. There are no safes that, practically speaking, âthe government canât search,â and most people donât own a safe at all.
This is different than encryption technology that every single smartphone user may have access to, and which may be practically uncrackable.
Sure. And there are legitimate uses for locks on houses, locks on cars, etc., etc. That doesnât mean that they should be unsearchable.
Of course, I think security is making something cost more than itâs worth to steal. Honestly, you raise a great point about unsearchability. Ultimately it may be a mistake, but I am in favor of it for two reasons. 1) To dumb security down wholesale seems to weaken the entire digital ecosystem. Insomuch as our ability exchange information online is a good, thatâs a bad. 2) The balance of power seems overwhelmingly in favor of centralized authority. When bad people grab it (and they always do) how do we effectively push back. Encryption.
These may all be a moot point, for the genie is out of the bottle.
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There are special ones with self-destruct compartment. Try to get in, and a thermite or explosive charge is initiated.
So what? So some clown in a suit claims I shouldnât be able to have such toy. He will be so ignored!
You assume that âencryption technologyâ is equivalent to âunsearchable by authoritiesâ. Not a good assumption. It is trivial to balance the interests of all parties.
The position of Judge Posner and his ilk is one of ignorance (like your position) and laziness.
Youâve lost me. Heâs complaining about technologies that are unsearchable by authorities. this is the kind of encryption Iâm talking about (note that I didnât say that all forms of encryption are unbreakable, just that people with smartphones may have access to unbreakable encryption). And can you give me an example of this trivial balancing of interests, if youâre not too lazy to do so?
Well, thatâs if you try to get in a certain way. I suspect there are ways to open them without destroying contents; it just takes more time and/or effort.
Does that apply to toys like RPGs? Is your argument merely a practical one (as in, itâs impractical to try to enforce a prohibition on functionally uncrackable encryption?), a rights-based one, or a utilitarian one?
I stated exactly what I meant. We live in a time when it is possible, trivial, to balance the interests of all parties. It is possible for the vast majority of people to enjoy a reasonable amount of privacy and, when warranted, investigating authorities to be able to legally obtain access to most private data.
In other words, @patrickemcleanâs safe is a good analogy of what is possible. As is @shaddackâs special-safe analogy.
Humans have had access to unbreakable encryption since at least 1882. Making such technologies illegal, as Judge Posner has proposed, is an idiotâs errand. Blocking determined people from using such technologies is impossible; even with the full force of the law.
I can. I certainly enjoy helping others understand.
I have changed my mind. I am no longer interested in helping you reduce your level of ignorance.
You cannot move the thing. You cannot breach the thing (e.g. overpressure inside). You cannot change the outside pressure. You cannot xray it (which you likely donât know in advance - whoosh goes the thermite). Ultrasonic imaging is also out. The thing can bristle with sensors like a hedgehog with pricks, ready to foil the pricks that want to get inside.
âŚand then a miracle happens and you get in and the thing inside is a hard drive, encryptedâŚ
You have better chance to stop proliferation of large, heavy things in material realm. Tough luck with easily concealable digital stuff.
And youâre mixing together attack weapons and (mostly passive) defense systems.
All of them.
This reminds me of this podcast: A thousand pounds of dynamite
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So, youâre saying that Posner is wrong when he suggests that there are (or will be) phones that the government canât search, and Cory is wrong when he says allowing government access means allowing everyone access.
I see: itâs fair play to call me ignorant and suggest Iâm lazy, but take umbrage when I use the same language. Arenât you clever. Or maybe just lazy, I guess, which is apparently a horrible sin.
Well, all of the reasons youâve provided are practical. Posner is working strictly from a utilitarian perspective, and he figures that when there are legitimate national security concerns, those concerns almost certainly trump the privacy concerns. (Note that this is not saying that privacy has no value, or that access should be possible outside of the national security context.)
Make it a landmine, then, and not an RPG. You could defend your house with this kind of booby-trap, just like your booby-trapped safes.
Sure, you can still argue that it would be easier to enforce an anti-landmine law than an anti-encryption law, but this says very little about whether an anti-encryption law is conceptually wrong.
He is right. The machine does not have the ability to discriminate between a government agent with a legitimate warrant, government agent without a warrant because might makes right, and a third-party impostor.
Open a hole and they will come.
In practice, practical reasons tend to trump the philosophical ones.
Govtâs desires tend to creep. Put a system like this in under any pretense, and in a decade or two you have it used at routine traffic stops or stop-and-frisk-and-cellphone-inspect searches.
Well, I am kind of in favor of landmines. They tend to cause collateral damage and may backfire if you forget about them or if they wonât allow access to firefighters attempting to save your property and possibly you, and there are other arguments against to favor more discriminating approaches, but mines and booby traps are powerful silent sentries and have their applications.
We can also argue that a mine is only semi-passive; it releases destructive, potentially lethal, energy when activated. (Though less-lethal landmines are better, tactically. A dead adversary is one out. A significantly wounded one needs at least one or two others to care for, so it is 2-3 and possibly more out. On the other hand, a dead one cannot sue you.)
Encryption is different in being entirely passive. You can step on it, kick it, burn it, and it wonât do anything back to you. It will just sit there, denying you access. The physical component can be as harmless as a small explosive or thermite squib over a tiny SO8 chip, if you want to drive the point home; or even not pyrotechnic at all, as all you need is erasing some 256 bits within a RAM of the sentry/key-storage device.
Technologically, maybe. But I canât even get more than three people to agree on where to go to lunch. No matter how you choose to balance these interests, somebody is going to be upset about it.
I think he thinks he is. But even for the value of national security, I think a very strong case is to be made that a centralized system is less secure than a decentralized system. Certainly less prone to abuse from bad people. The more distributed power is, the less power there is for someone to seize and abuse. People are not angels. Electing or appoint them does nothing to improve their character.
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I remember when the âRight to Privacyâ was considered one of the âEssential Freedomsâ that America stood for. How outraged Americans were that communist governments spied on their own citizens. When the term âBig Brotherâ was a bad thing. How times change.
I suggest that the USA needs to change itâs catch phrase, as âThe Land of the Free, and the Home of the Braveâ no longer applies, fear has usurped freedom.
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In that quote I wasnât saying that Cory is wrong; I was saying that Both Posner and Cory being wrong seemed to be the implication of what @longname was saying.
There are lots of tools/machines that can be used properly within the warrant/authorized context and improperly without that context. That doesnât mean the tool should not exist.
Practically speaking, itâs hard to enforce insider trading and antitrust laws, not to mention rape laws. Does that mean they shouldnât exist?
I think this deep, libertarian, American distrust of government is really your core objection. But I have little belief i most slippery-slope arguments. Weâve had stop-and-frisk since Terry v Ohio in 1968. Weâve had traffic stops since well before that. Both would allow for searching of physical address books carried on the person. Yet we have recent SCOTUS recently saying you need a warrant to search a cell phone.
OK, now youâre finally making a utilitarian argument about the cost of landmines and encrypted devices, but only in terms of how much damage they can inflict on people standing next to them. Posner doesnât see the cost as being that limited in the national security context, where lives may hinge on the encrypted information.
It opens a large security hole. A security crater or a security barn door may be a better expression.
Their enforcement methods usually do not leave everybody vulnerable. The harm side of them is not as bad.
My core objection is the distrust in stability of governments. The history is full of precedents when a free-ish, democratic-ish govt got replaced with a strongly authoritarian overnight. Germany in 1930âs is a worn-out example, so letâs look at the Eastern Europe takeover by Stalin, the Khmer Rouge affair, the South Vietnam takeover, and numerous coups here and there.
In such events, the legal safeguards suddenly evaporate and the only thing remains is the technology itself. If you got it riddled with holes âprotectedâ with laws, you suddenly get it only riddled with holes and the protection is gone like a kitchen shrink-wrap foil under a hot air gun.
A slow drift along the slippery slope is only one of the worries. Things can, and in many places did, go south virtually overnight.
If you think this cannot happen in your country, you are somewhat overly optimistic.
A cell phone is way WAY more than a mere addressbook.
Yes. Because thatâs what ultimately matters.
What definition of ânational securityâ? Isnât ânational securityâ served better by a secure communication infrastructure that is robust against everybody including the government itself (and including foreign and domestic enemies with appetite for strategic info)? What are few individual lives in comparison with the lives such compromises can cost? What about yet other lives lost or impaired by misread/misinterpreted decrypted data, as selective reading of intel combined with wishful thinking/interpretations is not exactly unheard about in both intelligence and criminal investigations?
Thatâs a valid argument, but it is a switch from your original argument on the trustworthiness of government officials to use them right.
Lack of enforcement of securities laws doesnât leave people vulnerable? Tell that to everyone who lost anything in 2008. Lack of effective rape-law enforcement doesnât leave women vulnerable? Sure.
This is a curious statement coming from someone who was just talking about how technology cannot, from a practical perspective, be stopped. So either the government has, or will create/procure, anti-encryption technology; or the private sector and the public will be able to deploy uncrackable technology regardless of the governmentâs preferences. Either way, the relative goodness of a government is pretty irrelevant.
Again, just about every use of government power is a conceptual step towards authoritarianism, and if the core objection is on the grounds of governmental power creep, then you have to object to all manner of governance, policing, licensing, regulation, etc.
Thatâs a bit like saying that if you think a peasant revolution cannot happen in your country, you are overly optimistic. It may be true, but itâs no a possibility that is meaningful to most people.
And the SCOTUS has already recognized this, contrary to your slippery-slope assertions about how this will lead to deployment at stop-and-frisks.
Well, itâs pretty easy to quantify the potential damage from national security events (as defined by Posner). Itâs much more difficult to quantify the damages youâre talking about, or even imagine what they are. How has the collection of your metadata impaired your life? How many lives has it impaired or killed? You might be right about the costs, but itâs a much more difficult price to quantify.
Not exactly a switch, though it may look that way. The original argument was way wider, with may parts unsaid, this is one of its parts.
Wasnât it more a lobbied-for repeal of the safeguard laws?
Entirely different can of worms. I prefer to not use emotionally loaded examples unless strictly necessary, they cloud up thinking.
Governments change both by slow drift and fast changes. Their relative goodness is not suggested to be relied on. Plus thereâs the plain old incompetence and all the bad-apple individuals. And the bad-apple do-gooders who think they are The Good Ones.
While some is needed, a great part of it is unnecessary crapola that seems designed just to keep the bureaucrats employed. The papers are taking over the world.
Cambodia.
A rare good kind of a setback. The powerful crave more power because they never have enough, kind of like the rich crave money. There are exceptions, the question is if they will be meaningful enough to reach some sort of balance.
Ummm⌠like?
None of mine, so far as far as I know. The records (manual) of calls from switchboards from occupied France were used to round up suspects of Resistance. I have no doubts UK analyzes metadata of protest groups (ecology, anti-airport-expansions, other citizen groups) to counter their activities; they are likely not aware of it as well, these things are kept secret and only sometimes they get disclosed. I feel wrong when I call (or get a call from) activist friends as I am aware of the connection being documented; if I decide to get deeper-involved in something, I will endanger others who arenât (as far as I know) but I am in contact with. Feels definitely not-good. Could be considered harmless under the overoptimistic assumption that you will never ever significantly disagree with your govt, or whoever holds the keys to the data.
And because of the secrecy you do not know where the threshold between harmless-ish support of local dissenters and something that gets you under real surveillance with possibility of raids is. And the threshold can be rather fluid.
The secrecy makes it difficult to quantify. The existing surveillance operations against guerrillas and resistance movements in e.g. WW2 or later conflicts, and the dissent-suppressing operations in many countries more and less authoritarian contain heaps of anecdotes.
