Do you have the right to speak to your friend in Spanish, use sign language, or whisper in the vicinity of a police officer? Encryption doesn’t interfere with any investigation or evidence; the govt. can still collect exactly what I send to my friend, they just don’t know how to read it.
I think a closer analogy would be clothing - you use it to conceal things that would embarrass you if they were revealed, but another person might use it to hide shoplifted goods or a gun. Certainly, many encryption advocates want to see it become as common as clothing, used for mundane material. Advocating universal encryption is no more “Enabling people to ignore the law of the land” than popularizing bulky jackets.
Except all of those things are destroying property that does not belong to you. That there is a bad analogy, and I’m not quite sure why* you chose them in trying. Encrypting your own data and you whining about that feels a bit like a would be stalker complaining that you have sabotaged his plans by putting a lock on your own damned mailbox.
Well, all the more reason to enforce the warrant requirement by insuring that each each e-mail access requires a significant investment in resources to either crack the encryption or bypass it by planting a keylogger. The government is protected from the temptation to break the law, thus avoiding scandals such as LOVEINT, and the populace is protected from government abuse – a perfect win-win.
The NSA dealt with LOVEINT internally and effectively. You countermand your own claims by bringing up an example of the system successfully policing itself.
Exactly! And the government can demand your encryption key if they have a warrant! That is more power than they have over your clothes, because they can then go back and decrypt any old messages you sent that they recorded. But you don’t have to walk around naked until then, even if that might help law enforcement spot guns or drugs that they didn’t previously know about.
I believe the idea is to have it available, so that with a proper warrant, you can then find and listen to the phone call a suspected terrorist made last month.
My understanding of the legality is that it’s perfectly OK for the NSA to listen to the phone calls of a suspected terrorist as long as they have a court warrant. And it’s NOT OK for them to listen to the calls of regular citizens en masse. The middle path, which seems to be legal, is to store the fleeting data so that if they then need to access it in the future, they can get a warrant and then go listen to the phone calls, or view the internet traffic, of people who are specifically suspected of crimes.
If I’m not using email to commit crimes, there’s no justice to be obstructed. I don’t have to let the cops search my home because a guy five blocks away may have stolen something.
I find the mindset that we should all be assumed to be criminals, and therefore all subject to a universal, clandestine, continuous and neverending criminal investigation to be extremely dangerous and frightening. You apparently have no such qualms.
[QUOTE=Edward Snowden]
“You got young enlisted guys, 18-to-22 years old—they’ve suddenly been thrust into a situation with extraordinary responsibility where they now have access to all of your private records,” Snowden told The Guardian. “Now, in the course of their daily work, they stumble across something that is completely unrelated to their work in any sort of necessary sense, for example, an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising situation, but they’re extremely attractive.”
[/QUOTE]
Because clearly 18-22-year-old men have no other way to acquire nude photos of attractive women.
Did he not meet the slander-America quota that his KGB masters set for him if he wants to continue sponging off their largesse?
Are you a parody account? In what way is that a rebuttal? You think women volunteering or paid to pose for nude photos on porn sites and NSA employees passing around nude photos of women that shared them, in private, between a small number of people are equivalent?
Try to stay on message. We’re discussing the failing of America’s intelligence community, not the KGB or Russia’s largesse.
I’m saying that this sounds exactly like the sort of thing I’d make up if I’d run out of legit information to sell to the press and I needed to come up with something to get them to pay attention to me again.
In what way does it sound even remotely made up? Given previous scandals like LOVEINT, this sounds eminently plausible. You wouldn’t be trying to discredit the idea that voyeurs within the NSA are passing around nude photos of women that they’ve intercepted because it demonstrates a gaping weakness in your position on both the NSA and encryption, would you?
Besides, the Snowden leaks have been a constant dripping of information for the last year. The idea that anybody needs to “pay attention” to him, or he needs to make things up to garner attention, is absurd. He already has everybody’s attention. His last revelation, on GCHQ’s ability to manipulate online polls and spoof website traffic, was from two days ago.
Whether or not that is the sort of thing you would do, and your inclination if so to project this character trait onto others, have no bearing on an actual news story supported by documentation.
In any case, the sooner the communications infrastructure is secured against taxpayer-funded Peeping Toms, the better. I daresay that the voice of informed public opinion is on my side.
So I am to believe the government whose rollout of the Obamacare website was about as technologically successful as the Blackberry Playbook has managed to find a way to store and index approximately fifty billion years’ worth of audio data?
Is it even possible that the NSA could LISTEN to all that? How many employees do they have, anyway? A trillion?
I think you can take the two situations as parallel. The government can, indeed, store massive information. Whether it is then being used efficiently and effectively, to the best technological standards, is an entirely separate question.
It’s quite literally impossible. The only way it could be done is with audio bots that listen for key words. But a bot cannot parse context on the fly, so it would flag every mention of “bomb,” “President,” “murder,” anything that sounds remotely terrorist-y. But the computing muscle required behind a bot that crawls EVERYTHING would be insane. Then don’t forget to add in all the Xbox, World of Warcraft, and Skype listening that the NSA supposedly does.
People are so hung up on the “why” that they’ve decided to just ignore the “how.” And the “how” looks pretty damn unlikely.
The difficulties in getting actual needles out of the haystack only tilts the balance further against actual benefit and toward abuse – the order “Look up Nosy Q. Muckraker’s phone number and e-mail and send me everything you’ve got on him” is several orders of magnitude easier to implement than “See if any of the Teeming Millions you’re surveilling is plotting to blow something up”.