They have been evil for some time, as far as privacy goes. They, more than anyone else, have been behind the push to a post-privacy world. Adding law enforcement hooks is the natural extension of this.
The quandary is that powers that "invade the privacy of law abiding citizens" are also powers "to stop evil."
Pretending they aren't is part of the problem, as it empowers those who would push them to publicly advertise the latter good in a vacuum of silence from the tech side.
Something like 'Personal privacy is more important than maximizing law enforcement efficiency, including of CSAM' is a more honest, complete position.
Amidst all the recent fervor surrounding law enforcement and privacy, I think the documents at the linked site are a good reminder that there are people in law enforcement working to protect the innocent.
I think the first commenter on the site said it all :
"the systematic exploitation of private personal information by corporations and government is the modus operandi of a surveillance / police state.
Already this is being abused for corporate espionage, political benefit, and a host of criminal enterprises.
The manufactured pretext that all these erosions of privacy are ok because "we found bad guys" has been the same bogus justification for every single abuse known to history.
A simple extension of this illegal principle in practice means privacy and Constitutionally protected rights are null and void.
Jobs! Fraud! Crime!
"We'll keep you safe!" "We'll save insurance companies money!" "We'll catch criminals!"
They don't mention that they'll abuse this in an untold array of intrusions and privacy violations... for their commercial and political benefit."
The loss of privacy should be balanced against the aid it provides to law enforcement to catch criminals. So, even though the loss of privacy is more extensive, the capability of the cops to catch the bad guys is also better.
We already know there is no way make a back door that only the "good guys" can access.
However I see that discussion as moot because governments past and present already abuse the information technology they have access to. Below is just a small snippet of the seemingly countless number of examples I could find in minute of searching:
There are many people who consider working for the law enforcement of the USA is an inherently evil practice, and the subset of them that consider themselves as revolutionaries might want said data as to enact punishment - similar to what the police does to the people who they consider as criminals.
The exact opposite, they are the only ones you should never trust because of other powers. To everybody else because they lack the enforcement powers they would mostly just be annoying with it. With police powers combined with a surveilance apparatus it becomes a horrifyingly abusable justification and tracking engine along with a wonderful way to insert pretexts for arresting anybody they don't like. Previously the search process would get slapped down along the way either from warrants or being judged a waste of resources.
It is sort of a bleach and ammonia thing. One or the other is more or less fine with some potential for both legitimate use and abuse but together are a horribly toxic combination which is guaranteed to hurt and kill innocent people.
Yeah, they just step around due process and use parallel construction to throw people in jail who they couldn't actually prosecute. That makes the destruction of our privacy ok, I guess.
Coming soon: a proposal to hold the government responsible for every breach of data that occurs because they corruptly assigned some contract to an irresponsible third party or hired a minimum wage cop who decided surveillance power's main use is to prove that you really do secretly love him [1]. And of course for selling your private photos. [2]
Wait. Nope, no way in hell the government is responsible for those things [2] (even ignoring the fact that the government internally knows about thousands of abuse of surveillance data cases as the AP points out and I was able to find 2 references to cases about such abuse, neither held the government responsible for anything (and neither was filed by the government). However they do make clear that government cares deeply that cops not be punished for abusing surveillance systems)
Law enforcement and detective work in this century is very lazy. They want to strip privacy for an easier job.
Engineers that get rid of security or do it half way are seen as bad.
Yet people enforcing the law, stripping away laws and rights they are here to protect, do this to make it easier for 'national security'.
Respect for the law has taken a huge dive down with the War on Terrorism and the War on Drugs with many similar parallels. It appears to be diving even further. Good quality detective work is being worked out in favor of constant surveillance.
Given the rapidly declining state of individual privacy, when discussing these extensions it helps to be specific about the authorized agency and context. For example, these days, it's pretty much a given that NSA-type spy agencies are already getting all of whatever electronic communications they want with little friction. In the US there are certain supposed safeguards against surveilling US citizens domestically but we've already seen how quickly and easily these have been circumvented by using partner 'five eyes' agencies and commercial data brokers.
While this is obviously problematic, to me, it's even worse if domestic law enforcement agencies gain new ways to remove friction like warrant requirements or at least the need to make specific per-instance requests (which are possible to (in theory) be tracked and reviewed to detect over-use and abuse). The idea of domestic law enforcement agencies gaining access to "full take" feeds of everything enabling them to retrospectively build massive connection trees of metadata which can be searched is downright terrifying.
It makes me wonder why the government works so hard to get new powers of investigation. It seems easier to catch someone now than it ever has, despite the preponderance of new privacy tools. Using good old fashion police work like warrants, subpoenas, plea bargains, surveillance, etc, police can put together a lot of pieces that add up to a whole (I make a comment elsewhere in the thread about the problem of plausible deniability in the face or corroborating evidence). Why the hell do they need more tools?
Perhaps someone in law enforcement could shed some light on this. After all, I am looking at this from the outside.
Basically, I need law enforcement to prove they're not full of shit. Law enforcement and intelligence systems have a long and ugly history of abusing easy access to private information. They also have a long history of working around technical privacy protections at need, in pasts both distant and very recent.
Until then, I think we should give their claims all the weight of all the evidence they have provided. Or failed to provide.
The fundamental problem is accumulation and correlation of, for lack of a better term, “public private data”.
Phone records, credit card statements, toll road data, cell tower data, etc. is not “our” data, it’s the assorted companies data. It just happens to be directly related to private activities even if in public places.
So authorities route around principles of privacy and such by engaging in entities who are not us. There’s nothing stopping authorities from talking to a neighbor. “Did you see anything? Were they home last night?”
“Oh, you’re a delivery person, did you deliver something to that house? Do you know what it was? Can you describe who answered the door? What time was that?”
Technically, that’s what the investigators are doing. No different from long standing investigation techniques.
The problem is scope, volume, ease of access, detail of the data, and, most important, how long it’s kept. Wouldn’t surprise me if the phone companies have my travel history for the past several years.
The concentration, resolution, and time span of the data makes the “Enemy of the State” movie more and more real. But it’s all using fundamental investigative techniques, policies, precedents and such that police services have been using for 100 years. It’s just cranked up way past 11. Those old court rulings and such, and concepts about what privacy means today need to change, or we’ll never be able to leave our houses.
Great to see justice in this case. On the flip side, privacy treasure trove's like this may become a tool for targeting non-criminals, for example classified cases targeting anonymous political activists or similar. It's no longer their own opsec activists need to worry about. It's all so very Gattaca.
This is an awful story. One thing that seems glaringly obvious: the police does NOT need additional snooping powers on the Internet - they simply have to learn to use what's already available. Yet, politicians will likely soon claim that they need more such power that anonymous supposedly have.
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