Law enforcement has more tools for mass surveillance than ever before. The Stazi could only dream of what we have built. But it's not the job of tech companies to make policing easy, and it's not in the best interest of a free people to give their government too much power. Please look at the history of the FBI for examples.
Sorry for delay in responding. The issue is that there’s a huge proliferation of inaccessible comms which creates a growing sea of unchecked globally enabled online activity. This isn’t the same as allowing people to congregate in person and in private. The abstraction of privacy expanding on a virtual global scale presents unique challenges to law enforcement. This is independent from the proliferation of surveillance mechanisms at hand, and isn’t a valid counterbalance.
The tech companies assume power and disclaim responsibility. It is their job to police their pipes, so respectfully and urgently I disagree.
Concerns about historical corruption within three letter agencies is best addressed by working towards technical solutions that enable proper checks and balances amongst involved players: governments, tech oligarchies, and commoners. The current trend is towards a growing sea of entropy without checks and balances, and this is unacceptable to governments motivated to maintain/increase order and reduce suffering. Resistance via deployment of technical libertarian mechanisms at scale isn’t a solid long term solution.
The federal government isn’t aiming to ban math, encryption, pgp, one time pads, steanography, etc. Instead the goal is to prevent the proliferation of unbreakable encryption at scale, as that growing void enables criminal activity at scale, despite the growing surveillance apparatus.
