What utter nonsense. Law enforcement absolutely has a solution: they use the traditional methods of investigation that have always worked. Wiretapping is a somewhat recent development, historically speaking, and it obviously isn't the only method of investigation.
The only reason you see law enforcement getting annoyed at encryption is that they really liked how easy wiretapping (and the modern equivalents) made their job, and the power it gave them in the form of "parallel construction".
> What tradeoffs should be made?
A big problem with the rhetoric about rights and security having an inversely proportional relationship is the assumption that by giving up rights would actually result in better security. This is at best unproven, and often results in a loss of security.
Playing devil's advocate here, but instantaneous long-distance communication is also a very recent development, historically speaking. Traditional investigation methods relied on tracking people's movements, who they associated with and so forth. Digital communication has almost completely removed the requirement for non-digital criminal relationships. As we saw with the DPR hired-killer case, two people can collaborate to perform a crime with zero non-digital connections. How do you use traditional methods in a world where criminals can just go about their daily lives, pausing occasionally to send a message to someone who could be a co-conspirator or could just be their mother?
I don't think subverting encryption is necessarily the answer, but to say that law enforcement just wants to do things the easy way is to ignore the emergence of a very real problem that they face.
The government has admitted that it is impossible to reliably extract one party's communication without either watching all the time, or having the ability to do so, and I don't think it's for a lack of creativity. In a way we were spoiled by wiretapping because now we have set the expectation for hard, recorded evidence to be the standard, because facts can't lie.
Thing is, this new age is a bigger can of worms than encryption versus the government is always watching. It could be 10 years away, it could be 50, but a computer will someday be able to generate your voice, create a fake video of your actions, and the state could put you away for nothing - and everyone could believe it.
Neither of you are wrong. Machines can be fooled by prior, and people can be fooled by machines.
What utter nonsense. Law enforcement absolutely has a solution: they use the traditional methods of investigation that have always worked. Wiretapping is a somewhat recent development, historically speaking, and it obviously isn't the only method of investigation.
The only reason you see law enforcement getting annoyed at encryption is that they really liked how easy wiretapping (and the modern equivalents) made their job, and the power it gave them in the form of "parallel construction".
> What tradeoffs should be made?
A big problem with the rhetoric about rights and security having an inversely proportional relationship is the assumption that by giving up rights would actually result in better security. This is at best unproven, and often results in a loss of security.