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by mvitorino 3774 days ago
But there isn't an (at least widespread) equivalent of crypto for phone calls. So not really comparable.
1 comments

There will be. Of course there will be. Encrypting phone calls isn't a particularly hard problem; the hard problem has been getting the audio frames of a phone call into the clutches of software to begin with, and we've already just about killed that problem.
Absolutely. But my only point is that we can't directly transpose the legal experience over 50 years in wire taps since there was never an equivalent debate over it's privacy. Wiretaps weren't really questioned because there wasn't a real expectation of privacy on phone calls since we started out with human switchboards.
Wiretaps were really questioned in court. Maybe there was less public debate about them at the time or less awareness of how widespread wiretapping could become; I'm not sure.
Also, before computing, wiretaps were extremely labour intensive. So mass surveillance wasn't a possibility. This is what repulses people.
I think I'm suggesting that mass surveillance can also be repulsive to the people who are concerned about "going dark".