> None of their dire predictions came true. "Indeed, in 1992, the FBI's Advanced Telephony Unit warned that within three years Title III wiretaps would be useless: no more than 40% would be intelligible and in the worst case all might be rendered useless. The world did not "go dark." On the contrary, law enforcement has much better and more effective surveillance capabilities now than it did then."
This seems like a silly argument as the goal of publicly available strong end-to-end encryption is to make exactly this prediction come true. Strong privacy advocates are rarely concerned with their friends or even some corporations having their data, it's precisely the vague yet menacing government agencies monitoring everyone's online activities that are the targets of these 'encryption for everyone' projects.
I absolutely agree with the author in general but there's no sense pretending that protection against mass surveillance and state level actors isn't the end goal.
It seems like the tech community is stuck on encryption because they belive their government is evil, corrupt, and if they can just win this one fight then they will be able to shield themselves from the rights violations they can't hope to change. It's noble but incredibly defeatist. State level actors will always have smarter people and unlimited resources to break whatever walls you try to put up. This won't end until surveillance is made impossible via legislation (or I suppose revolution if that's your thing).
Surveillance won't be prevented through legislation. If the will existed to do that, then that same will would simply reform how that surveillance got used.
Power always desires more control for its own sake, and this still applies even when that power is divided via democracy.
Essentially government itself is inreformable with regards to this subject - not this government, not that government, but the entire class of mandatory centralized controllers [0]. It will always seek more control and legibility - the only way for boundaries to get set is for things to be physically impossible. It seems like the existence of encryption could be a law of nature, so it makes sense to build on that and fortify the boundary rather have legislating mathematics look almost reasonable.
[0] This is not a complete indictment of concept. Government can still create good things and be a force for good. But many aspects of reality are not straightforward for it to control. Long ago we decided it was a Bad Thing when a government starts implementing the invasive controls necessary to reach over these boundaries. When a government goes down that path, we call it totalitarianism.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 21.0 ms ] threadThis seems like a silly argument as the goal of publicly available strong end-to-end encryption is to make exactly this prediction come true. Strong privacy advocates are rarely concerned with their friends or even some corporations having their data, it's precisely the vague yet menacing government agencies monitoring everyone's online activities that are the targets of these 'encryption for everyone' projects.
I absolutely agree with the author in general but there's no sense pretending that protection against mass surveillance and state level actors isn't the end goal.
It seems like the tech community is stuck on encryption because they belive their government is evil, corrupt, and if they can just win this one fight then they will be able to shield themselves from the rights violations they can't hope to change. It's noble but incredibly defeatist. State level actors will always have smarter people and unlimited resources to break whatever walls you try to put up. This won't end until surveillance is made impossible via legislation (or I suppose revolution if that's your thing).
Power always desires more control for its own sake, and this still applies even when that power is divided via democracy.
Essentially government itself is inreformable with regards to this subject - not this government, not that government, but the entire class of mandatory centralized controllers [0]. It will always seek more control and legibility - the only way for boundaries to get set is for things to be physically impossible. It seems like the existence of encryption could be a law of nature, so it makes sense to build on that and fortify the boundary rather have legislating mathematics look almost reasonable.
[0] This is not a complete indictment of concept. Government can still create good things and be a force for good. But many aspects of reality are not straightforward for it to control. Long ago we decided it was a Bad Thing when a government starts implementing the invasive controls necessary to reach over these boundaries. When a government goes down that path, we call it totalitarianism.