This was triggered by the passage of the US CLOUD Act and the Supreme Court's dismissal of US v. Microsoft. Also by EU plans to facilitate cross-border police access to electronic evidence. "You can’t always get what you want: the eternal conflict between lawful access and privacy" https://www.ivpn.net/blog/ Also, for up to date news on the global police state, I recommend adding a bookmark to the I&J Policy Network's Retrospect database: https://www.internetjurisdiction.net/publications/retrospect
And damn. I just found this: You Can't Always Get What You Want: How Will Law Enforcement Get What it Needs in a Post-CALEA, Cybersecurity-Centric Encryption Era? by Stephanie K. Pell Assistant Professor & Cyber Ethics Fellow, Army Cyber Institute & Department of English and Philosophy, United States Military Academy at West Point; Affiliate Scholar Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society Code: https://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1306&context=ncjolt It's a long paper. Even the abstract is long. But it's well worth reading!
It's not clear to me that the CLOUD act and (presumably bilateral) agreements in the EU will in fact be lawful. The usual cycle is that after several years, a case reaches the ECHR and they throw it out as breaching human rights (in this case, particularly, right to a fair trial), and say it isn't necessary and proportionate. Then, they make token adjustments that they knew would have to be conceded all along, rinse and repeat. I think the abandonment of MLAT is exceptionally dangerous and non-judicial. MLAT could and should be made to work, it doesn't necessarily have to impose unnecessary delay. And the delay is necessary to ensure the rule of law is followed.
Yes, that's the hope. But the new EU proposal does speak to "necessary and proportionate". Maybe token, though. I know little about EU governance and jurisprudence. But I have a hard time taking "judicial authority" seriously. In particular, I'm unclear whether it includes administrative process, or just decisions by actual judges. And yeah, those EU-wide warrants! Gotta catch those terrorists quickly, I guess
I feel as if I am in agreement with you guys on this issue. However; I would be less than honest if I don't admit to some small agreement that complete "darkness" leaves LE in a bad spot. It seems abundantly clear to me that backdoors/etc are misused to the point of rendering them REQUIRED being a bad idea. Mirimir, that read was a long one, but worth my time. I can't help wondering if a company designed like Protonmail (the company itself has NO access, only the user) will be "killed" sometime in the near future. I hope not, but I wonder!
Yeah, I love that paper. And Stephanie Pell has great taste in titles It was at the top when I searched after IVPN had posted my piece, because I searched for "you can't always get what you want lawful access privacy". Anyway, she's a former prosecutor from Florida. Her paper uses, as an example, a case that she handled in ~2000, involving gun smuggling by the IRA. She argues that investigators have become accustomed to getting electronic data through CALEA etc. And more and more, to what's becoming electronic mass surveillance. But that efforts to maintain such access with pervasive "strong" encryption, tweaked to allow lawful access, will expose users to malicious adversaries. Her paper came out before the The Shadow Brokers dumped all those hacking tools from the NSA. And that's the canonical example. If the bloody NSA can't keep its stuff secured, what hope would there be for massive key-escrow databases? If that's an unacceptable risk, which she argues that it is, investigators will need to get data on a case-by-case basis. Just as they did when she was a prosecutor. She does conclude that this will likely involve hacking stuff, such as insecure IoT devices. But that's better, she argues, than mass surveillance. Which would come with the risk of system-wide encryption compromise, if malicious adversaries gain access to government key-escrow databases.
You know, there is a huge problem with all of this that makes the recent and ongoing implemenations of global mass surveillance far worse than even it appears to be if you just take it at face value. Most of the intelligent section of the population has figured out already, the 911 terrorists and ISIS were manufactured and created for geo political purposes by our own governments. Too many people in former high positions in both US and European governments have said this publicly(although the mainstream media won't report that) for it not to be taken seriously. The point being, firstly, this means THEY are the criminals and the terrorists and WE are being subjected to mass surveillance by THEM!! Secondly this means the supposed reason for it, terrorism, is a falsehood designed to hide or distract from whatever is the REAL reason and you can be sure there is a real reason which has not yet become apparent and this is the question all of us should be asking. What is the real reason? While everyone thinks it best to just not say anything, don't question the terrorists story or anything to do with it for fear of being labelled, they will just continue with no credible opposition to any of it. One day people will look back, historically and say, how could they have allowed this to happen? Why did they not speak out? They had the power of the internet on their side but they just did nothing. What was wrong with them? Was it fear? Now let me say this, I am not by any means a crackpot paranoid conspiracy theorist, I am just a regular guy like everyone else except I did a lot of reading and researching and comparing presented evidences of all of this with a lot of skepticism to begin with. I only began researching what happened because I wanted to arm myself with facts to tell those 911 conspiracy theorists how stupid they are on the "truther" websites so I was actually shocked to find the information and evidences that supported a lot of what they said and even more so when I learned who some of them are.
There is one possible explanation and this one I'll admit is purely a theory. If you know absolutely everything about everyone, everyone they communicate with, what they said privately and publicly, everything they buy, everything they do, everyone they associated with, everywhere they went and everything they did there. You'll know, nobody leads a perfect life and everyone has things they would rather the rest of the world didn't know about. So when you have the power of total surveillance and therefore know all those things, that gives you the power to discredit, publicly embarress and even criminalize, anybody. Anybody who opposes you or speaks out against you.
Maybe you're right. History is loaded with false-flag operations. Which many at the time thought were real. Leading to revolutions, wars, and all sorts of craziness. I used to ponder that stuff, a lot. I spent lots of time hating on the system. But now, I just do my best to focus on what I can do. Now. With the tools that I have, and what I can learn. Whoever those power-mad freaks who are ruling the world really are, I just want to be left in peace. And to be left with a world to live in, of course. Not that there's much that I can actually do about that. Anyway, bro, please don't get the thread killed
