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by throwaway847345
3337 days ago
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> From his perspective as the head of the FBI whose job it is to achieve outcomes within the law, of course Comey advocates encryption backdoors. Wiretapping and search warrants are long standing and well support ways for law enforcement to investigate among other things organized crime. Just because you know have encryption doesn't mean that has changed. Similar to how the NSA didn't suddenly stop doing signal intelligence just because they allegedly "lost the crypto wars". > Nobody would reasonably argue that extreme surveillance measures, patriot act, etc., is necessary to stop the vast majority of crimes from occurring, so why is it so easy for seemingly serious/intelligent people to think this nonsense is reasonable? It's a presumably a "better safe than sorry" and "nobody got fired for choosing more surveillance" kind of a thing. > Terrorism is a political word to describe political enemies of the state, yet the patriot act and surveillance machinery has been used in enforcement of many other kinds of (less serious) crime. Terrorism is just the ultimate argument of people in the establishment. Just like encryption enthusiast might have some story about how they are helping dissidents, but are mostly encrypting their warez and mundane e-mails. |
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True, but there is a big difference between presenting evidence to a judge to obtain a search warrant and subsequently manually wiretapping a phone line or two and the sort of massive-scale surveillance/capture we have today.
It's like the difference between a doctor examining an awake patient who has complained about a specific symptom... vs to a doctor sneaking into the bedroom of thousands of sleeping non-patients and performing a secret physical exam on their genitals just in case anything about their genitals seems alarming.
The crime (building the illegal infrastructure to do that surveillance) is now justified after the fact by a fairly quaint comparison to traditional police work.
As much as I'd like to, I don't believe that surveillance is about police work. It's about political intimidation which is identical to the kind of political intimidation that seems obvious when talking about other police states from history.
The effects of intimidation are not obvious as everyone expects them to be. I'll make an analogy with the North Korean regime to illustrate my point.
How is it possible that the leader of N. Korea is able to make statements to the public that are obviously absurd. Are people in N. Korea less rational than elsewhere? Less intelligent? No, but over time the range of ideas considered acceptable has adapted to include some of the most ludicrous (and contradicted by fact) claims imaginable.
How does this happen? I think it happens gradually. How likely are we to loudly criticize our government when we know all our devices contain a hot mic and all the audio might be getting recorded? Maybe we still offer a criticism but we couch it a bit or we follow it with some praise. Small things like this mean that we all hear less criticism, less scrutiny, less dissent. All because we are not sure who is listening or who will be reported to authorities for holding a controversial view.
Over the course of decades, perfectly intelligent, rational people in N. Korea are easily able to believe some fairly outlandish claims simply because of a few decades of secret police presence and fear of being reported.
What does this have to do with the US? By definition, terrorism is a political crime. It causes intimidation and fear. It is designed to be asymmetrical and sporadic, and is impossible to stop. The only way to fight it is with extreme social control... a more compliant society where holders of nonstandard beliefs are more easily identified.
If the surveillance data had not been used to fight non-terrorism crimes, or if the systems were designed with a cryptographically provable audit trail, I'd consider the possibility that this was just a more modern way of doing law enforcement. But sadly I think all of the evidence points in the other direction.