Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday June 23 2020, @05:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the using-all-available-resources dept.

So Much For Going Dark: FBI Using Social Media, E-Commerce Sites To Track Down Suspects (Including Non-Lawbreakers):

You know the drill, right? The FBI keeps insisting that it has a "going dark" problem due to encryption making it impossible to access key evidence of supposedly criminal behavior, in theory allowing crime to happen without recourse. The problem, though, is that nearly every single bit of this claim is false. It's kind of stunning.

  • It appears that, in practice, the FBI almost never runs into encryption.
  • In the rare cases where it has (and we don't know how many because since the FBI admitted it over exaggerated how many "locked" devices it had, and then has since refused to provide an updated count), there do appear to be ways to get into those devices anyway.
  • But the key issue, by far, is that the opposite of going dark is happening. Thanks to our increasingly electronic lives, the government actually has way more access to information than ever before.

Two recent articles highlight this in practice, with regards to the FBI trying to track down the rare cases of criminal activity happening around some of the protests.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @01:20PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @01:20PM (#1011540)

    Do you want to stop police investigations altogether? No tracking down criminals so they can be caught and charged? I know we'd all on this site like more privacy (well, some of us, the rest of you insist on using login accounts and barely tolerate us ACs), but there MUST be a balance between privacy and the cops being able to do their jobs. That is the conversation we ought to be having.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday June 23 2020, @01:39PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday June 23 2020, @01:39PM (#1011550) Journal

    The user has no obligation to give up their own privacy/anonymity to assist police. And anything that involves an encryption "backdoor" can fuck off.

    Using publicly available info on social media, like they are doing in this story, is fine. There are also plenty of cameras all over the place capturing most movements in public. There could be a rejection of real-time facial recognition given that the conversation right now is about defunding the police, not giving them a panopticon surveillance tool, but we can let that "conversation" play out.

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by meustrus on Tuesday June 23 2020, @03:16PM (3 children)

    by meustrus (4961) on Tuesday June 23 2020, @03:16PM (#1011591)

    Do you want to stop police investigations altogether?

    There ought to be nothing special about the police when it comes to investigation. Private investigators are already more effective anyway.

    We don't need government agents with special powers. We need laws that require public transparency. If it's not safe for the public to access, it's not safe for the beat cop to access either.

    We should stop thinking of the police as heroes that enforce law and order and start thinking of them as providing two distinct jobs: executing judicial orders, and investigating crimes. Those two jobs don't need to be done by the same organization. A better system would treat detectives as private investigators that can file claims to the government, like some combination of public defense attorneys and Medicare. Then boost the funding, now that these people are subject to normal laws instead of special kill-what-you-want cop laws, and they are actually on the side of the victims that hired them.

    --
    If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @04:37PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @04:37PM (#1011622)

      Sorry bro.
      If cops can't make quick decisions in the street and act on them, you will have a lot more theft and deaths. We have seen this happen in the experiment of CHAZ/CHOP and other cities when you remove the police. You need police presence to provide security.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @06:53PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @06:53PM (#1011678)

        Then how do you explain the looting happening everywhere else? There's plenty of police there. They're armed to the gills. They're out in force. We're still seeing broken windows.

        We don't have security. We don't have law and order. What we have is a big gang that's good at threatening poor people and not much else. What we have is the largest prison population in the world - not despite the aggressiveness of the police, but BECAUSE OF THEIR AGGRESSION.

        This idea that cops are out there to "protect" anybody completely flies in the face of the evidence. Cops are out there to intimidate black teenagers so that when they see a crime, there's no way in hell they're calling 911. Cops are out there to take black dads from their kids so that there's nobody to keep them on the straight and narrow. Cops are out there to kill people and start race riots.

        We can do better. We must.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @07:13PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @07:13PM (#1011686)

          Mayors of leftist dumps instructed the police to not aggressively engage and disperse the protest-rioters.
          Do you read the news? Police chiefs say the mayors tied their hands. Those mayors refused to call in the National Guard.

          As for black people being hurt by cops: far, far more black people are killed by black criminals. If they don't have cops patrolling the neighborhood, innocent black people die. Just like happened in CHAZ/CHOP which is why the mayor finally disbanded it. She could gave done that many days ago, but no. People have to die first.

          I also don't know how old you are, but the major American cities were war zones of crime in sections, run by gangs. Then in the 1990s the Democrats decided to get tough on crime along with the Republicans. Result? Less deaths for everybody, blacks included. Now people are talking about going back to the same soft on crime policies of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. You will bring back the bad old days if that happens.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @04:41PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @04:41PM (#1011626)

    I'll worry about that when the laws are not obviously illegal (unconstitutional) and the enforcers not seditious scum. Until then fire them all for all i care. I don't need government to "protect" me or mine.