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by tptacek 3774 days ago
Again, who are you arguing with? Abuses of systematic collection are a great reason to support universal encryption. Certainly, it's the primary reason I support it.
1 comments

> Again, who are you arguing with?

Why do you keep trying to shut this down? I'm clearly arguing against points you have made in the quotes cited in my post.

> Abuses of systematic collection are a great reason to support universal encryption. Certainly, it's the primary reason I support it.

I think we finally agree here. I just don't know why you appear to keep making counter arguments if this is how you truly feel.

Because systematic collection isn't the only, or even the most important, issue at stake in the "going dark" debate.
Then what is at stake here?

We have essentially a decade of evidence to show having access to electronic communications (both encrypted and not) has little to zero effect on law enforcement's ability to do their job.

Just recently, the Paris attackers use unencrypted cell phone text messages to coordinate and plan their attack. Nobody detected it...

Before that, the FBI successfully caught Ross Ulbricht, through good 'ol police work (because they couldn't beat his encryption and proxy usage).

We don't need access to private communications (both encrypted and not) in order to conduct lawful law enforcement -- we just need better law enforcement practices.

All this anti-encryption rederick put forth by the government is really just smoke and mirrors, covering up systematic failures of law enforcement.

This seems far-fetched. Encryption has historically had zero effect on law enforcement, but collection of electronic evidence has made thousands of felony cases. Meanwhile, the issue isn't simply what criminals encrypt today, but the fact that everything they do will be encrypted in 15 years.
> the issue isn't simply what criminals encrypt today, but the fact that everything they do will be encrypted in 15 years

Everything everyone does will be encrypted in 15 years -- and that's a good thing. It makes it harder for the bad guys to be, well, bad.

Identity theft happens to far more Americans every year than the number that have been involved in a terrorist attack since the founding of our nation.[1] Backdooring/weakening/banning encryption will literally make stealing people's identities far easier. We want to make the government's job marginally easier to spy on everyone at any time, but we're ignoring the major side-effects of doing just that.

[1] http://www.techjuice.pk/a-data-scientist-explains-odds-of-dy...

I'm confused as to why you keep bringing terrorism up. I haven't brought it up once. I am not especially concerned with terrorism, and I'm not especially concerned about identity theft --- at least, not to the point where I think we need to address it with regulation on consumer devices.
> Meanwhile, the issue isn't simply what criminals encrypt today, but the fact that everything they do will be encrypted in 15 years.

No, everything they do will not be encrypted in 15 years. Most relevantly, except when the crime at issue itself is an act of communication, the crime won't be encrypted, or even subject to encryption, so all the usual police work that enables solving crime based on the actual criminal act and the evidence naturally attaching thereto will remain available.

I'm not sure what this has to do with my argument, which is that electronic evidence definitely plays a nonzero role in law enforcement today.
> We have essentially a decade of evidence

For extremely large values of "decade".