Comment by dataflow
2 days ago
I think the crucial bit you're missing is that the fundamental disagreement boils down to whether a properly-signed-and-executed warrant ought to be sufficient for the government to get its hands on evidence or otherwise do what it needs to do to deliver justice.
To you, he seems to believe Yes, and to him, I think you seem to believe No. Historically, the answer has been Yes, and crypto has fundamentally changed that. I think crystallizing exactly why you believe the right answer is No is essential, otherwise you're just not going to convince people on that side -- in their mind, I think, you're demanding more rights than you historically had, and at the cost of protecting the rest of the population.
No, historically the vast majority of communication was not recorded, and so a warrant could not be used to access the communication. The fact of the modern world is that for the first time in history almost everything we do is recorded, and so subject to those warrants.
I'm not sure what you're saying "no" to. Nothing you wrote contradicts what I wrote. Anything that was recorded was fair game. The whole point here is that you're arguing reality has changed and thus so should the legal rights people are granted, whereas this person's father is simply saying that our current legal rights imply a different conclusion. These two sides are not contradictory; they're just talking past each other.
the problem is that technology has changed so much that it's legitimately hard to apply 18th-century laws to 21st-century life:
- does the plain view doctrine allow TSA to look under your clothes with mmWave sensors? or to peek through your walls with IR cameras? to use laser microphones to listen in on a conversation? to use EM emissions from your computer to conduct a side-channel attack?
- does the third-party doctrine allow police to read your emails (unlike actual letters) without a warrant? or your papers on Google Docs? to access streaming cloud backups from your home security cameras? to buy your location data from data brokers?
- does your fifth amendment right against self-incrimination protect you from confessing your passwords? from taking a polygraph? from measuring your P300 signal as you look at a lineup? from using fMRI to reconstruct images from your visual cortex?
- does the right to bear arms include AR-15s? machine guns? loitering munitions? tactical nukes? ICBMs?
there's a scale from textual pedantry to handwavy analogies. courts are increasingly going on vibes and hacking together post-hoc justifications because the source material is too abstract and too dated to allow any straightforward reading.
If we're sticking to current legal rights when reality changes, then the state can live with their current tools when the math protecting my communication changes. Wiretap my encrypted communication streams all you want, don't suddenly compel me to decrypt them for you - the law has no provisions for that, and in fact, that violates the fifth amendment right against self-incrimination.