Comment by rich_sasha
14 days ago
It's easy to construct a reasonable scenario. You catch a guy doing something bad. You know he's a part of a big organized crime organisation, because you already caught some of the other conspirators. And you could bring the whole thing down based on documents / chats etc which are encrypted.
I'm not saying, based on that, you throw away privacy rules. But to not even acknowledge that there is a conflict is IMO insane.
Reading through this thread, I get the sense that the desire for absolute privacy stems from a perception of the government as basically another mafia - a ruthless, unprincipled organisation that will exploit any weakness in you, just because. Maybe that's the root of the difference. I'm lucky enough to have never lived in such a country. Sure, I care about government accountability, there will always be bad actors, and governments in general aren't always super-competent, but I believe fundamentally, governments in places I have lived are not evil. They aren't another mafia I need a firewall against.
>You catch a guy doing something bad
If you have evidence that he was doing something bad, prosecute him. You must have evidence, because you couldn’t know he was doing something bad based off these chats you can’t read.
>You know he's a part of a big organized crime organisation, because you already caught some of the other conspirators.
So charge them with conspiracy or RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations).
>you could bring the whole thing down based on documents / chats etc which are encrypted.
How can you possibly know that? If you have evidence of crimes, use that to prosecute. If you don’t have evidence, then you don’t know crimes were committed. Regardless, you don’t even know if these encrypted chats contain anything incriminating.
Government is not another mafia, they are a group of people who are flawed. “Good” governments have laws protecting the rights of citizens against individuals within government. That is like saying that we don’t need defense attorneys because prosecutors are good people and wouldn’t bring a case against an innocent person, or would never bend/break the rules to get a conviction. We have them to protect the rights of the innocent and the guilty.