Comment by narnarpapadaddy
21 hours ago
> This is about guiding principles, about personal liberty, and about freedom from tyranny.
The point he’s trying to make, as I understand it, is that states adapt. They don’t just throw up their hands and say “guess we can’t do anything about that encrypted traffic.”
The response to distributed kinetic kill capability in the US, for example, is for police to become more militarized and treat every encounter as a potentially lethal one.
> There's private, and there's not private. There is nothing in between
It’s not an argument about privacy per se, it’s highlighting that the stronger the protections against state surveillance and intervention, the stronger the state becomes. By taking an absolutionist stance, we push our institutions to towards the same in response.
I’m not making an argument or against encryption or privacy, just pointing out the systemic effects.
Expecting that governments won't respond to software which is tailored to prevent them from investigating crimes (e.g. Signal's primary marketing is all about preventing government access to chats) was so utterly naive that only privileged techbros could make it up.
Other people understand that picking a fight with someone will result in a fight.
How did the police in XIX and XX century even managed to investigate the crimes without having access to the records of criminals' communications, and with way worse forensics available? No, seriously, how?
One of the things they did is they investigated metadata: you know, witnesses who saw what people walked around? Today we have way more of such data, readily available for them, plus ubiquitous CCTV and the like. That's not enough, apparently? Also, the police used to employ informants among the criminals themselves, and even implant the cover agents. Apparently, this nowadays is too expensive/bothersome, compared to running a global search for the keywords in the text messages and the transcripts of all voice messages sent in the country during the last month.