> I have never met anyone who understands what cryptography is, and supports the FBI.
I understand cryptography and I broadly support the activities of the FBI. You have now “met” such a person.
It’s fully possible to simultaneously support opposing concepts like end-to-end encryption for users and the organizational imperatives of the FBI. A nuanced perspective might consider that citizens and the FBI have separate prerogatives and competing incentives with respect to private encryption, and this is perfectly fine.
A consequence of an organization optimized to reduce crime is its natural zeal for greater control over things that grant criminals freedom. Secure cryptography represents thermodynamically incontrovertible freedom of communication, which is intrinsically antagonistic to control. In the abstract, any organization striving to (in effect) reduce the rights of criminals will produce friction with the rights of citizens in general. But that doesn’t make the organization’s goals incoherent or evil, it means there must be a system of checks and balances. The ideal goal is one of compromise - we want to reduce net criminality, but we want to increase privacy.
We have that compromise because open, end-to-end encryption (and private companies willing to implement it securely) is available to us. But the existence of arms race between parties does not indicate that one party’s overarching goals shouldn’t be supported. One party desires greater control, the other desires greater freedom. Both can coexist despite their competing incentives.
> In the abstract, any organization striving to (in effect) reduce the rights of criminals will produce friction with the rights of citizens in general.
Criminals are still citizens with rights, or else Due Process has no meaning. Striving to reduce the rights of any citizen is not a defensible goal for a US governmental organization. Rights should apply to all, or they're not really rights. The government steps in when rights are violated.
> But that doesn’t make the organization’s goals incoherent or evil, it means there must be a system of checks and balances.
It does make the organization's goals anti-constitutional.
> The ideal goal is one of compromise - we want to reduce net criminality, but we want to increase privacy.
No. No all the way. We don't and can't "reduce net criminality" directly. That drifts into implications of policing pre-crime, for which everybody in law enforcement wants surveillance as a magic bullet. Beyond "just" constitutional concepts, I think a lot of people would classify pre-crime surveillance, engagement, and enforcement as actual full blown Evil.
The penal system of a free and civilized country should police actual wrongdoings; and should foster positive educational, cultural, and environmental shifts away from crime. Not destroy freedoms in the name of "protecting" them (when in reality their goal is increasing internal & external political metrics), as the ghastly hypocritical current systems do.
This isn't some new balance to be discovered. It is a clear limitation of powers to prevent violations of rights that already represents a balance.
When they're asking for some ability to perform searches and collect evidence, that's not necessarily counter to the US constitution. Quite the opposite in fact.
> Amendment IV
>
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
You seem to be arguing against a strawman created by a limitation of our current technology. We don't have a way to give them limited access. Right now, we can give them everything, or we can give them nothing. But they're not asking for everything. So we should find a way to allow truly (technologically) limited access, and to make sure that those limits are tight.
I'm specifically arguing against the generalizations the parent was making in particular. "Striving to reduce rights" of US citizens is generally anti-constitutional as a concept, especially for non-lawmaking organizations.
The 4th amendment doesn't really affect any of the original crypto argument, because the search cannot be performed. Cryptography prevents the "this is the way that's acceptable" act from even starting. Note that the amendment simply says that a warrant is allowable in a bounded implementation; it doesn't demand that warrants must be executable.
For instance, if a warrant is issued to search a non-existent building it's just as moot. It doesn't require the building to be created if it's not there.
I feel that I must point out that while most criminals remain citizens, this is not necessarily the case. In fact criminals (not suspects but convicted criminals) are not even guaranteed freedom from slavery as the thirteenth amendment specifically excepts criminals from its protections. There are actually a number of rights which are diminished by a criminal conviction.
I'm not saying it's right but it's the way it is right now.
This line of reasoning is disturbing to me. I don't want to live in a world where there's effectively a traffic camera pointed at the contents of my phone. Bandying apologetics regarding how limited it's used and how badly it's needed won't change my mind.
Would you consent to having a microphone embedded in your driver's license that the FBI could "only turn on if they really needed it"?
When the people with power get to define the meaning of the constraints on their power, their power is without constraints. It disgusts me when companies and individuals are press ganged into being enforcement arms of the government. In my opinion, it takes a certain blindness to history or a level of sociopathy to be fine with this.
> I don't want to live in a world where there's effectively a traffic camera pointed at the contents of my phone. [...]
Would you consent to having a microphone embedded in your driver's license that the FBI could "only turn on if they really needed it"?
Not the GP, but I didn't read anything in dsacco's post that implies any of these. I understood it as saying that it's possible to understand the technology, and even have a strong pro-encryption and pro-privacy stance, without believing that FBI as an institution is fundamentally corrupt or motivated by malice. There is an inherent tension between the FBI's mission, citizen's rights, and the nature of encryption, and it looks like that tension might never be fully resolved.
> When the people with power get to define the meaning of the constraints on their power, their power is without constraints.
I fully agree, and I'm as convinced as you are of people's inability to restrain themselves once they have unchecked power. "Just trust us" always ends in disaster.
> It disgusts me when companies and individuals are press ganged into being enforcement arms of the government. In my opinion, it takes a certain blindness to history or a level of sociopathy to be fine with this.
This is the part I have trouble with; as I see it, there are more than two ways to characterize one's position on this issue than simply 'for or against', 'principled vs. sellout', or 'clear-eyed vs. blind'.
> Not the GP, but I didn't read anything in dsacco's post that implies any of these. I understood it as saying that it's possible to understand the technology, and even have a strong pro-encryption and pro-privacy stance, without believing that FBI as an institution is fundamentally corrupt or motivated by malice. There is an inherent tension between the FBI's mission, citizen's rights, and the nature of encryption, and it looks like that tension might never be fully resolved.
My opposition to the FBI's stance on this is independent of whether or not the FBI is corrupt or motivated by malice. The FBI, being made up of mortals, is an ever changing organization. Giving a philosopher king autocratic powers is giving that power to the tyrant that comes later. The tension between those with power and those surrendering power is older than the FBI. I agree it will never be resolved.
> This is the part I have trouble with; as I see it, there are more than two ways to characterize one's position on this issue than simply 'for or against', 'principled vs. sellout', or 'clear-eyed vs. blind'.
It's a bit incendiary, I'll give you that. I feel pretty strongly about this and let some of that leak out.
That's an interesting position. I wonder if the opposite is also true: that the more principled and morally righteous the organization, the less it attracts such people and the more it attracts more morally upstanding and intelligent people who like the challenge.
Your hypothetical may be moving on the wrong axis. I think a more appropriate counter example is whether or not positions that no one surrenders any power to attract tyrants. Does a tyrant wish to be a kindergarden teacher?
Not looking for a counterexample, just wondering if the human psychology involved has a dual that can be exploited to ensure high quality, incorruptible investigative agencies.
> I understood it as saying that it's possible to understand the technology, and even have a strong pro-encryption and pro-privacy stance, without believing that FBI as an institution is fundamentally corrupt or motivated by malice. There is an inherent tension between the FBI's mission, citizen's rights, and the nature of encryption, and it looks like that tension might never be fully resolved.
Yes, thank you. This explains my thinking more succinctly and clearly than I did :)
You're misunderstanding the comment you're replying to. It concludes that "there must be a system of checks and balances". Are you saying that there shouldn't be?
I think in this case a slippery slope counterargument is not obviously wrong. According to the UN, a person's correspondance is sacred and each and every one has a universal right not to have the privacy of their correspondance breached.
Why are we now debating the privacy of encrypted correspondance from a baseline of no privacy for unencrypted correspondance?
What says we will not continue to accept more and more, as long as it is only a small step from status quo?
> What says we will not continue to accept more and more, as long as it is only a small step from status quo?
The Overton Window [1] says this is exactly what will happen.
There's a great video [2] about how this applies to Trump (which is where I first heard about it) and gives a good example of what "shifting the Overton Window" looks like.
A person's papers and correspondence is similarly sacred under the US Constitution.
The problem is that digital paper isn't paper, and while you can be charged with a felony for bypassing a computer's access controls, the law doesn't respect those controls at all. Your electronic documents have to be in your home or in your direct control to be protected.
According to the UN, a person's correspondance is sacred and each and every one has a universal right not to have the privacy of their correspondance breached.
The Fourth Amendment says the same thing. It has been under relentless attack from the Supreme Court, but one senses a change in the weather...
Well said. I credit that you've elevated this discussion out of the reductionism it has been started with.
That said, I think if we are to approach the question of the FBI analytically/intellectually we might want to start by asking a few questions.
1. How should we measure the efficacy of the FBI? - Net lives saved / dollar spent? Is it a conflict of interest if we let the FBI self-report lives saved?
2. How do we account for the risks of the agency "going rogue" and not following the rule of law? For example, how can we quantify the risk to civil rights caused by the FBI-King suicide letter [1]?
3. When the FBI presents an argument that encryption is a problem, how can we measure whether it's a trade-off we [the people] want to make [safety vs privacy] unless we're presented with a proposal that articulates what credible threats may be prevented (how many lives saved, program cost)?
4. If the majority of citizens do not consider want to forgo their privacy for additional safety, should the FBI be beholden to respect the will of The People who hire it (via taxes)?
all human beings should be allowed to record their thoughts and communicate without those thoughts being surveilled. What is so different in 2018 that the ability to think and communicate in secret is somehow a threat to law enforcement? Law enforcement has always had to work hard to crack a case. Now that computers exist, they want to have a comprehensive record of everything that's ever been uttered, retroactively play back anything that the authority deems inappropriate, and make arrests on that basis. It is fascism in a can. There could be no clearer indication that political protections are inadequate to safeguard this than the current president, who has run amok without legal consequence (to date).
I cannot understand how any thoughtful person can support anything more invasive than hard police work and a warrant... any legal case can be cracked with human tools, because no criminal operation has 100% operational security. The need to spy on the thoughts of innocence is an insane price for any extra crime fighting ability we get on top of this.
Why does the FBI need to decrypt the phone of a spree shooter?
What could they possible learn, after the fact?
What could they possible know that isn't more easily ascertained by other means?
Every thing about every person is known in real time. If the NSA, FBI, whomever could not identify and thwart undesired behavior with existing tools (follow the money, network analysis, profiling, sentiment analysis, follow the bullets, etc, etc)... Well, they'd have to be unforgivably incompetent.
[I believe they do all these obvious things. Which is why we've seen so few terrorist attacks. (If only they cared as much about spree shooters.)]
Further, what enemy of the state is using COTS communication system? You'd have to be an incredibly stupid drug dealer, human trafficker, money launderer indeed to conduct business via iPhones.
So if the panopticon doesn't and can't help defeat the bad guys, what's the point? Does the government really need to eavesdrop on the selfie nudes my teenagers are sending their friends?
If supermarket chains can predict pregnancy based on shopping history, maybe one day mass murderers may be predicted by their behaviours as recorded in the contents of their phone?
The protagonists have a limited opportunity to go back in time and attempt to thwart the crime, prevent a catastrophe. Paradoxes! Unintended consequences! Regrets!
I understand cryptography and I broadly support the activities of the FBI. You have now “met” such a person.
It’s fully possible to simultaneously support opposing concepts like end-to-end encryption for users and the organizational imperatives of the FBI. A nuanced perspective might consider that citizens and the FBI have separate prerogatives and competing incentives with respect to private encryption, and this is perfectly fine.
A consequence of an organization optimized to reduce crime is its natural zeal for greater control over things that grant criminals freedom. Secure cryptography represents thermodynamically incontrovertible freedom of communication, which is intrinsically antagonistic to control. In the abstract, any organization striving to (in effect) reduce the rights of criminals will produce friction with the rights of citizens in general. But that doesn’t make the organization’s goals incoherent or evil, it means there must be a system of checks and balances. The ideal goal is one of compromise - we want to reduce net criminality, but we want to increase privacy.
We have that compromise because open, end-to-end encryption (and private companies willing to implement it securely) is available to us. But the existence of arms race between parties does not indicate that one party’s overarching goals shouldn’t be supported. One party desires greater control, the other desires greater freedom. Both can coexist despite their competing incentives.