[bayindirh]

The thing is, most people think that governments wants new tools for surveillance. The fact is, they had this power for a very long time (see Crypto A.G. and history of NSA and others), and practical and verifiable E2EE took these capabilities away.

Now they want their toys back. This is why the push is so hard and coming from everywhere at once.

[mplewis9z]

I think this is an extreme take - they only had those mass surveillance tools since the start of the internet, and any other method of communication (phone calls, physical mail) all required warrants individualized to specific people to tap. But somehow the internet is excluded from all those privacy protections, and now that there’s technology available to ratchet us back to where we used to be, law enforcement agencies are throwing a tantrum about not being able to constantly violate our privacy.

In my mind, it’s pretty simple: if you want to surveil someone, get an individualized warrant to access their devices and data. If they refuse or wipe their data, treat it like destroying evidence in a case and throw the book at them. There’s zero excuse for what law enforcement and intelligence agencies have done to our privacy rights since 9/11.

[bayindirh]

These (mass surveillance) programs go back to 60s, and it was already prevalent before internet was widespread, also internet was also under blanket surveillance way before. Moreover, this is not only limited to internet per se. Phone calls and any form of unencrypted communications are probably actively monitored for signals intelligence. We're not seeing laws related to this, because mechanisms are probably already in place.

So, I'm keeping my stance of "They want their tools back, because they had them before".

[MobiusHorizons]

There are very strict laws against wiretapping on calls within the US. Warrants are required before the call can be recorded. That’s why there was so much controversy over blanket metadata collection.

[thelittleone]

How to achive total pervasive surveillance? One step at a time where each step is not quite too much to cause rioting and revolution. Outrage has a very short attention span.