> Attorney General William Barr said in a speech last month that encrypted messaging services allow "criminals to operate with impunity." The cost of encryption is “ultimately measured in a mounting number of victims — men, women and children who are the victims of crimes, crimes that could have been prevented if law enforcement had been given lawful access to encrypted evidence,"
This disgraceful, emotionally manipulative statement is an obvious lie. Police/FBI/etc have have access to far more information about criminals than any point in history. The average person (criminals included) leaves behind an incredible amount of "digital exhaust". They should be able to build a complete pattern-of-life easily with 3rd party data (e.g. ad tracking), various side channels, and the massive amount of metadata[1] recorded every time criminals used their phone.
Of course, using all of that data to find a criminal requires actual detective work specific to each case. Encryption (especially on a phone examined after a crime) isn't preventing law enforcement from investigating crimes; it is, however, harder to automate. This anti-encryption argument is really about automated mass surveillance, not finding specific criminals.
> Digital forensics is way outside typical leo training
That's the problem: attempting to prevent important new technology (actually-secure encryption) from being used is not a substitute for updated training that provides "typical leo" with digital forensics skills that are increasingly needed.
Susan Landau's 2016 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee regarding Apple's encryption on the San Bernardino shooter's iphone:
>> "Instead of embracing the communications and device security we so badly need for securing US public and private data, law enforcement continues to press hard to undermine security in the misguided desire to preserve simple, but outdated, investigative techniques."
>> "We need 21st century techniques to secure the data that 21st century enemies—organized crime and nation-state attackers—seek to steal and exploit. Twentieth century approaches that provide law enforcement with the ability to investigate but also simplify exploitations and attacks are not in our national security interest. Instead of laws and regulation that weaken our protections, we should enable law enforcement to develop 21st century capabilities for conducting investigations."
>> "Developing such capabilities will involve deep changed for the Bureau, which remains agent-based, not technology-based."
While this is easy to agree to broadly, what exactly does she intend that these "technology-based 21st century capabilities" are? If she's talking about something like PRISM, are we going to be any happier with that solution?
I wonder if this would be true if the War on Drugs did not exist. Or if the CIA hadn't played a large role in spreading crack cocaine throughout Los Angeles to fund a proxy war with Iran, leading to a massive criminal element and subsequent rapid militarization of police and refocusing of FBI, CIA and police resources towards non-violent, victimless crimes.
And it's crystal clear and obvious in this case that it doesn't matter. The man shot a bunch of people, and was subsequently killed to stop his slaughter. There is no doubt to his guilt. There is no case to build. While the public may wish to know more about the shooters motives, that's not something the public or any law enforcement agency needs to keep people safe.
This guy's (now deceased) sister drove him to the location. So she was in on it, too. (Why she's not included as a perpetrator in discussions about this event is odd.)
I'm sure he left evidence that goes well beyond his own phone if he was planning and plotting with others. They should have no trouble piecing this together with or without his phone.
It is quite up for debate whether it is more appropriate or not. Your view may not necessarily be the most correct. That is not a discussion to be had on Hacker News, regardless.
I see this a lot. People who are known to be trans in the wider LGBTQ+ community die, then their family deadnames them to the press, and people come out of the woodworks to defend the family and the press while ignoring the wishes of the person who died.
Sometimes, like in this case, it's complicated because they're only out to a few people. I would still rather err on the side of what close friends say rather than family. The family probably had no idea. They rarely do until someone's ready to come out to everyone.
> I would still rather err on the side of what close friends say rather than family.
Yeah I was thinking of the same. If they came out to their friends, it's probably who they wanted to be and felt most comfortable sharing with. It was also how they would have liked to have been remembered.
I have no knowledge here, but it seems like you're saying that journalists should out people who aren't out to their families? Doing that without having clear evidence of the person's intent seems it might be an invasion of privacy?
Maybe they can’t build a profile via ad tracking, because ad tracking isn’t as invasive/doesn’t collect data which can be tied back to a specific name.
Well, everyone is talking about how excited they are to violate the 2nd Amendment. Might as well violate the 4th, too, and maybe the 1st and 5th while we are at it. All in the name of safety.
I would argue that all of the Amendments have always been subservient to “national security” (whatever that means in any age), for better or worse.
Also, I have yet to hear anyone argue that we should “violate” the 2A, but I have heard lots of 1A discussion about how we could frame laws or discuss whether 2A is worth keeping in its current state.
If Apple does not give you the tools to decrypt messages on their phones, doesn't that make it "impossible" to automate, where automate is defined as any version of "decrypting the data on the phone"?
One thing to keep in mind is that really only two things Apple can do. The first is to release a modified and signed version of iOS to LE agencies that has any timeouts removed to allow them to try to bruteforce the passcode locks. If a user uses a significantly long password instead of a passcode, this becomes way less effective.
The second thing is to log iMessage data on the server-side (since it has to be decrypted at some point). This would allow them to produce it, but would miss any apps installed on the phone used for alternative communication.
I don't like to see this so much as Apple refusing but there really isn't a way for Apple to enable easy full access without a backdoor, which is an unrealistic expectation.
>The second thing is to log iMessage data on the server-side (since it has to be decrypted at some point).
iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, so that's also not an option. Apple would have to inject a key they controlled into a user's list of device keys. (Which they can do, and the UI doesn't notify users if it were to happen.)
True, but these days you can disable iCloud backups without giving up all that much. (it also re-keys Messages in iCloud when you turn off backups)
Keychain, messages, and health data are all E2E encrypted and synced to iCloud.
By not doing iCloud backups, you're basically only giving up backups of app icon placement, home/lock screen background images, app data that isn't otherwise synced via iCloud or the app's dedicated sync service, and a handful of phone settings.
You can opt for the occasional iTunes backup to preserve those infrequently changing elements on the phone, and not have to compromise on recovery point for more important data like messages and security creds since all of that is synced in real time.
That's the whole joke. Apple pushes E2E in advertising but fails to mention how by default it's all """backed up""" in their cloud where they hold the keys. It's ridiculous.
My understanding is the passcode and timeout behavior is on dedicated hardware that's tied to the OS level encryption. It's not possible (or maybe just not feasible) to replace or update this hardware.
I believe the point that OP is making is that the encrypted data on our phones is data historically would never have been available to law enforcement, as it simply wouldn't have existed. Then as now law enforcement can investigate but the investigative process is impossible to automate. On the other hand giving the government access to all the data that we now store about ourselves would enable automated forms of law enforcement that, in the past, were just not possible (this is what we're seeing in China).
Is the American government position “Guns don’t kill people, encryption kills people”, or am I just combining the personal opinions of a bunch of unrelated people who work for the government?
In the US, there are more firearms than people. About one-third of all households have at least one firearm [0]. The vast majority of these people have never had a serious brush with law enforcement, but some significant portion would refuse to part with their guns if a ban were enacted tomorrow. While it is said that nearly all Americans are felons [1], most Americans do not intentionally commit felonies or think of themselves as being on the opposite side of things from law enforcement. That would suddenly change for millions of ban-defying US citizens, and it's hard for me to imagine a likely scenario where that decreases violence in the US.
America has vast and currently unimpeachable rights to weaponry. There is a huge swath of policy space between that and banning gun ownership. We can reduce gun ownership, trafficking and weapon deadliness a thousand different ways while not adversely impacting legitimate usage. Universal background checks, limiting purchase frequency, banning 100-round barrels, increasing liability for dealers.
Not sure if you're joking there -- maybe you meant magazines?
Like so many other gun regulation ideas, it seems superficially reasonable based on "danger" but it's almost never the case that items like that contributed measurably to gun deaths. They don't need to be banned -- they are niche items. Mass shooters who have access to them rarely use them. They rarely use 40 or 50 round magazines. Indeed, people rarely purchase magazines larger than the standard 30 rounds.
We can reduce gun ownership...
That is not a legitimate policy goal. The earlier poster points out that gun ownership is not correlated with crime at all. We shouldn't set policy goals that are merely about partisanship -- trying to cut down on gun owners because we don't like them -- rather than a clear public benefit.
...increasing liability for dealers.
I would like to better understand what you have in mind here. In general, modern legal systems reject holding one person responsible for the crime of another. If a mass shooter lawfully purchases a firearm, what possible liability could a dealer have?
> That is not a legitimate policy goal. The earlier poster points out that gun ownership is not correlated with crime at all. We shouldn't set policy goals that are merely about partisanship -- trying to cut down on gun owners because we don't like them -- rather than a clear public benefit.
A 2014 review in the Annals of Internal Medicine concluded having a firearm in the home, even when it’s properly stored, doubles your risk of becoming a victim of homicide and triples the risk of suicide. [0]
Guns are intrinsically dangerous, in much the same way as certain aggressive dog breeds and industrial explosives. While many/most people can safely raise rottweilers, store dynamite, and keep guns, some will not. Is there a marginal benefit associated with the removal of each marginal gun? Obviously. Is gun ownership reduction a legitimate policy goal? Obviously. It's strange that you think otherwise.
> In general, modern legal systems reject holding one person responsible for the crime of another. If a mass shooter lawfully purchases a firearm, what possible liability could a dealer have?
Part of a more involved system of background checks would necessarily involve more action by dealers to verify that the customer's purchase is legal. Prosecuting and holding liable individuals who fail to follow established precautions when selling dangerous products is not unusual.
A 2014 review in the Annals of Internal Medicine concluded having a firearm in the home, even when it’s properly stored, doubles your risk of becoming a victim of homicide and triples the risk of suicide.
It doesn't say that, exactly, since it doesn't distinguish between properly stored and not properly stored cases. It is a meta-analysis; they took a bunch of papers and did the best they could. We can't say that if they're properly stored it's about the same, or worse, or better.
It also acknowledged some methodological limitations, including studying overall death rates, and not specifically deaths due to guns:
...we considered studies of suicide and homicide victimization by any means, and firearm-specific outcomes may differ.
Another issue the study encountered, was that gun ownership rates were not directly available to many of the aggregated studies, which therefore relied on various proxies.
What makes relying on a study like this to initiate a policy of reducing gun ownership not premature?
Part of a more involved system of background checks would necessarily involve more action by dealers to verify that the customer's purchase is legal. Prosecuting and holding liable individuals who fail to follow established precautions when selling dangerous products is not unusual.
We do have laws like this already -- FFLs do background checks for every purchase and if they fail to do so, they can lose their license. What are the expansions that you'd like to see?
Guns are supposed to be dangerous. That’s the whole point of their existence.
We already have background checks. Licensed dealers who fail to follow the law lose their license and are prosecuted. The atf has no difficulty in enforcing that.
And as already posted, there’s really no useful information in that “review”.
Liability like car ownership. Failure to secure your weapons imparts liability. Guns stolen or sold without a background check that are used in a crime carry a punishment for the last registered owner. Punishment ramps up rapidly with multiple offenses. This will punish traffickers but also encourage safety.
Correct. For one, it should be mandatory that care be taken that guns not be stolen. Locked up in safes when possible or otherwise attended to and not left lying around. Secondly, a missing gun should be reported immediately. Like I said, punishment ramps up after multiple offense. If it happens once, call it a fluke and fine $100 or whatever. If it happens twice you're being careless. If it happens more, you are probably a trafficker and should be prosecuted and lose your right to own guns. This kind of rule will affect very, very few people and hopefully zero responsible owners.
Presumably only if you fail to alert the authorities to the theft.
Of course authorities don’t always pay attention to registration changes — one UK police force sent me a speeding ticket for a car I had sold nine months previously, even though the DVLA had actually registered the sale and transfer of ownership.
It isn’t compatible with basic principles of liberal government to offer “What’s the harm?” as the basis for a restriction or policy. There needs to be a clear and just basis for government action, and a commitment to repealing or abolishing policies that do not prove to be worthwhile.
The same thing goes for asking “Why do you need that?” and if people don’t have a reason you like, taking that as a basis for restriction. In a free society, the people don’t need a reason — we can do what we like. It’s the government that needs a reason. We should be questioning proposed policies, with an eye to the public benefit, not because of any love of guns, but merely out of a basic requirement for government accountability.
A ban on "large capacity" (greater than 10 rounds) magazines was implemented 25 years ago [0]. In actuality, it did very little except to drive demand (and increase prices) for such magazines.
The trouble with those policies (aside from 100-round barrels... I have no idea what that means, and I don’t think you do either) is that they’re often-mentioned, but people forget to ask the question, “Have these policies actually improved anything where they’ve been implemented?” Many of the recently-publicized shootings in the US have occurred in California, which has some of the most strict firearms laws in the nation.
> We can reduce gun ownership
Do we actually want that, though? There are murmurs of defensive firearms use instances in the millions annually, whilst there are around 7k non-suicide-related deaths by firearm annually (1) (significantly less if you remove big anti-gun cities from the picture).
Compare firearms deaths with other causes:
* 70,000+ die from a drug overdose (2)
* 49,000 people die per year from the flu (3)
* 37,000 people die per year in traffic fatalities (4)
* 250,000+ people die each year from preventable medical errors. (5)
* 610,000 people die per year from heart disease (6)
There are a lot of things that might sound reasonable on the surface that the media likes to tout in the firearms debate, but many of them don’t hold muster. Why guns are the hot-button issue and heart disease isn’t plastered over the media 24/7? I think somebody has an agenda.
>Many of the recently-publicized shootings in the US have occurred in California
Many everything occurs in California. It has 12% of the US population. To be representative, one in eight US things should occur here.
>Why guns are the hot-button issue and heart disease isn’t plastered over the media 24/7?
If someone went out one saturday and gave 20 random people (or immigrants) a heart attack, it would be too. A huge amount of resources are already spent on things like preventing flu deaths. We just all agree it's the smart thing to do, for reasons you cited.
It's not evidence to not ignore gun violence, it's evidence to put as much effort into prevention as we do for e.g. flu and disease.
I think the point still stands: the three states with the most mass shootings are the three most populous, in order [0]. Texas and Florida have some of the loosest gun laws; California the strongest.
There's also the problem about gun violence vs. mass shootings, and how regularly the two are conflated. D.C has the highest percentage of gun violence deaths, but only one mass shooting [0] [1].
Of course, two-thirds of gun violence deaths are suicide [2] and about 80% of the one-third that are homicides are gang-related [3].
The war on drugs didn't work; we couldn't keep gangs from smuggling in drugs. What makes any one think we'll do any better with guns?
Next, arguments about high-capacity magazines. It takes three seconds to change an AK magazine [4]; you don't really need high-capacity. Yes, it takes some practice, but not a ton and many of these people start planning a month in advance (see El Paso guy's manifesto). Add to this that you can 3-d print your own [5], and likely manufacture one of reasonable quality. They're really not that complicated.
Finally, remember it really is the "tactical" or "scary" guns after which they go [6]. I'm convinced it's so they can win the white suburban mom demographic with pictures of black plastic pistol grips. Remember that most AR-15s are .223 cal. They would ban those, but let you keep your 30-aut-6. Lord knows how many M1s and Garands are out there, and I've never once heard them mentioned. At this point, I wonder if mass shooters go for an AR-15 because that's what all the others used and every one is just terrified of that one particular gun.
Now let's take President Trump's solution, "red flag" laws. Alan Dershowitz wrote an excellent editorial against these in the WSJ [7]. Such laws are wrong for the same reason "stop-and-frisk" is wrong and for the same reason I object to today's airport "security"; Americans are not to be treated like common criminals without comitting a crime. And if you don't think it will have a disparate impact on blacks and browns, then I've got a bridge to sell you. This also sounds like another brick in the road to a technocratic dystopia, a la China's "social credit score".
As mentioned by others, the opioid crisis is a much bigger deal, as are suicides. This is terrorism, which is designed to cause maximum fear and discord with minimum action. We could be discussing how to allocate resources to the problems which kill the most, rather than being driven by rampant alarmism. I wish we didn't have a twenty-four-hour news cycle going on about it, or politicians trying to make it a number-one issue. Fly the flag at half-staff, say a prayer, do what we can for the families of the dead, and move on. Some time, the cost of the "solution" is greater than that of the problem. Tragedies happen; there is not always something politicians can do. Good policy rarely comes from a place of fear.
> If someone went out one saturday and gave 20 random people (or immigrants) a heart attack, it would be too.
I'd love to see where people have proposed banning gas cans or truck rentals. (I wish I could also say 'knives', but Britain actually seems to be that retarded)
I can't tell whether you're being ironic or not. If you're suggesting hypocrisy for not proposing to ban those, consider their legitimate use. In restricting use of a potential weapon, you have to weigh the cost of the restriction. Restricting or banning truck rentals has a different effect on society than restricting or banning assault weapons, for example, so you approach them differently.
> Restricting or banning truck rentals has a different effect on society than restricting or banning assault weapons, for example, so you approach them differently.
Yep! You can ban truck rentals with little to no side effects, while banning gun ownership has a history of leading to genocide. Or is that not the comparison you'd make?
> Or for the really facetious answer, here's a nice post detailing not quite the truck ban you asked about
I'm not quite sure what comparison you're trying to make here. Yes, most vehicle rentals require you to show a driver's license, but that's a technical competency requirement, not a intentions requirement.
>banning gun ownership has a history of leading to genocide
Basically every other developed country has stricter laws than the US (which is what we're talking about, not full bans). It's ridiculous to suggest those lead to genocides.
> Many of the recently-publicized shootings in the US have occurred in California, which has some of the most strict firearms laws in the nation
If California's laws prevented some but not all of the shootings then it still should be considered a success.
> Why guns are the hot-button issue and heart disease isn’t plastered over the media 24/7? I
I don't think this is honest. If your mother and father died in a mass shooting you would not feel the same as if they had died of heart disease. To treat the trauma of violent deaths differently from illness/disease is very natural.
Rationally, if heart disease suddenly killed tens of people in a single event you had better believe it would make headlines.
> Why guns are the hot-button issue and heart disease isn’t plastered over the media 24/7?
Heart disease does get public attention -- check your breakfast cereal, as a banal example: odds are it touts its "heart healthiness" -- and gun control isn't 24/7 either.
But there are a few components to consider. One is that gun deaths are traumatic beyond the impact of just the death. The murder of someone you love, where another human being willfully ended their life, is a whole different thing to process psychologically than their death after an illness or even in an accident. Can we reduce those ripples of harm by preventing these murders?
That "willful" bit is important too: a gun enables a person to kill a bunch of other people. Should our society make that enabling easy? Heart disease isn't perpetrated by one person on another. And, yes, you can kill a lot of people at once with a car, too. But a gun's entire purpose is killing; aside from that and sport shooting it's useless. A car is actually better for just visiting grandma or picking up groceries than being a murder weapon.
And the most important point is to rebut the relative privation that you've presented: of course the other causes of death are a problem. That doesn't preclude dealing with this one. Gun control advocates believe that there are obvious, straightforward measures that we're not taking advantage of that can reduce gun violence. Are there such measures for the flu?
It can be also out of country purchases: go to Canada, buy the gun, come back. The situation is not different in any way, especially because if you buy the gun in Vermont or Canada you are still not allowed to get it in California. Do you want to regulate guns in Canada?
And that's assuming that people don't just manufacture the guns themselves - automatic rifles with box magazines are literally 1940s tech, and while making a good one takes a ton of expertise, something able to kill a bunch of unarmed civilians is a lot easier. For that matter, how long will it be before home CNC mills will be able to make modern(ish) weapons?
Soooort of, but not really - at least for the ones I've seen. There's a difference between "finish an 80% lower" and "make a gun from blocks of metal", and I think we'll hit the latter relatively soon.
Barrel should have been drum. Like what the Dayton shooter used to hit 14 people in 30 seconds.
100% irrelevant. Just because there's a lot of heart disease doesn't mean we don't care about gun deaths. If we passed all this legislation and the net result is that the next mass shooters only kills 5 people instead of 10, then it's still worth it. You don't need 100 round clip to defend your home. You don't need a flash suppressors or 1000 yards of range and you don't need an arsenal.
The trouble with these kinds of disingenuous replies is that nobody can take them seriously.
* You know what a 100 round drum barrel is.
* You know as well as anyone that automobiles exist, and that local laws can easily be circumvented, and hence has little bearing on how well a similar national regulation might work.
* "Significantly less if you remove big anti-gun cities from the picture". I'm sorry, but this is utterly irrelevant. Why would their regulations or lack thereof matter one bit in deciding whether the people killed by firearms in those areas "count"?
* "Murmurs of defensive firearms use instances in the millions annually" doesn't even attempt to sound evidence-based.
Pretending like you don't understand basic facts does not help your credibility. Although I suspect these talking-point replies are not meant so much to be taken seriously or responded to, but to merely decrease the signal to noise ratio in any discussion so as to drown out legitimate debate.
To take the remainder of your comment seriously:
For both good and bad reasons, people tend to take acts of violence, particularly indiscriminate ones, more seriously than, say, drug overdoses, where people, rightly or wrongly, blame the victim. Of course not all gun deaths are blameless, but neither do we want to pretend like suicides are unimportant.
Finally, we do try to take many of those other causes of death seriously. I get the argument of proportionality (we should spend 10x the effort on drug overdoses as we do on non-suicide gun deaths, I guess?), but unfortunately these stats are usually used in an attempt to say "nothing can be done".
No, something CAN be done. We can and should do better to prevent easily-preventable deaths -- whether or not the victim shares some blame in the death.
If we can save a few hundred or a few thousand lives, is that not a worthy goal? We are on a perennial march to make automobiles incrementally safer, but we haven't insisted that everyone climb into bubble-wrapped cocoons. Our regulators walk a line that sometimes errs to far this way or that way, we fight about it online, we argue with our representatives about it, but overall, progress is being made and lives are being saved.
And given that drum and barrel (when referring to containers) are usually synonyms in English, it's not unreasonable to imagine a non-english speaker confusing the two, remembering that 'barrel' is a term related to guns, and saying '100 round barrel'.
>A barrel is not a unit of measure for rounds. Learn something about what you want to discuss if you want to have any valid point, being clueless and talking is not a good idea.
Actually my whole point is that people should not care about, and not be allowed to own those things...
That said, I've been in the army myself back in the day, I just don't care for guns to keep reading about them 20 years afterwards, or to go read about the different variations on the market.
Nor is english my first language, I read that the shooter used a 100 round barrel, I guessed they mean an attached mechanism (round), or some magazine or something. I know that revolvers have barrels, and those bizarro mob guns in the 20s (tommy guns?).
Still, apparently there's a 20-bullet barrel, how about it?
They were joking, and you're being needlessly hostile. Plus you're wrong on multiple counts. Most of the counter examples are historic, but still.
Yes, barrel is not a unit of rounds, but there are situations where it would be appropriate. Superimposed loading is where multiple rounds are loaded in the same barrel and are fired sequentially. This is a very old idea, but for a modern take on it look up (the now defunct) Metal Storm. Terrifying stuff.
There have been guns with many more barrels than 7 or 8. Volley guns have been made with anywhere from just a few to nearly a hundred barrels. They weren't always big platform mounted monstrosities either. A famous example would be the nock gun: a 7 barrel, shoulder-fired flintlock.
Why do you care so much about reducing gun ownership in the US, when the US gov ships thousands of containers with weapons to KSA that uses them in Yemen?
Why do you assume a ban would take effect "suddenly"? As you rightly point out, it would make no sense to apply a gun ban instantly, tricking millions of Americans into technically becoming felons.
I think the point is that millions of Americans feel so strongly about gun ownership that they would rather be felons (and 'molon labe' their guns) than give them up.
We don't have to take anyone's guns. Even if we made some currently legal weapons illegal, just grandfather current ones and let attrition weed them out. I'll accept a solution that takes 30 years over nothing.
> I'll accept a solution that takes 30 years over nothing.
Guns last a lot longer than 30 years. 80-120 years sounds more like it. They are not going away anytime soon even if you do ban them (which wont happen).
The whole point of having guns is so that if somebody tries to take them away from you, you have the tools of preventing that.
The police in Hong Kong would be a lot more respectful if the (massive, dense) crowd was armed with more than laser pointers. The riots in LA where Korean shop owners defended their property. Etc., etc. Hell there were violent protests in Ferguson, MO not long ago.
"Gun Control" was originally just a mechanism to keep the (black, brown) population from owning guns; just a way of disarming the black/brown population. Look at the past laws, and current policing!
Some people in the US think "It can't happen here, now we should get rid of guns!" - as we watch the authorities putting children in cages, and protests in other countries where the police beat up protesters, and riots where people defend their loved ones and property, the rise of White Nationalism from "simmer" to "boil" and people still think we shouldn't have guns?
There's absolutely no way, in hell, Americans would willingly disarm - nor should we.
> The police in Hong Kong would be a lot more respectful if the (massive, dense) crowd was armed with more than laser pointers
This statement is laughable, yet terrifying in its naiveté.
> "Gun Control" was originally just a mechanism to keep the (black, brown) population from owning guns; just a way of disarming the black/brown population. Look at the past laws, and current policing!
The history of gun politics is inextricably tied to race, but your comment is as dismissive of gun control as it is unsupported and vague, as if waving your hands and dropping a hint of racial bias categorically invalidates arguments in favour of restricting firearms rights.
Yeah, terrifying for the CCP, but not for the people. "Disarm the populace" is authoritarianism 101. The IRA, Checnya, Afghanistan - armed and motivated populations are dangerous. Not sure how that's naivete; that's why it was written into the Constitution.
It isn't "a hint of racial bias" - gun control is directly racist, always has been. "Well it isn't now" doesn't hold much water.
Am I the only one who finds the use of "molon labe" farcical? I mean, the Persians did come and take them and killed the entire Spartan force in the process.
It makes more sense in context, take Patrick Henry's words in 1775 to understand what liberty and the preservation of constitutional rights means to Americans.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
or Thomas Jefferson in 1787:
"We have had 13. states independent 11. years. there has been one rebellion. that comes to one rebellion in a century & a half for each state. what country before ever existed a century & half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? let them take arms. the remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. what signify a few lives lost in a century or two? the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. it is it’s natural manure."
That was at a time when wars were fought with such arms, and the police had the same. Heck, that was true for 100+ years afterwards still.
Now the police even has tanks and army level guns, and the army of course has 1000x the resources, airplanes, drones, etc.
And of course, at the time the states were indeed independent and fighting fiercely for that. Now (and ever after the Civil War) it's all a charade, from what I understand, and it's all as the Federal government says, not really a union of independent states (as independent countries), but a state divided in N prefectures that just happen to be called states...
In your reading, guns used to be able to preserve liberty, but now they're irrelevant because the state security forces can just brutally crush any resistance with their superior firepower? That's not good rhetoric, and it's not even true! Just look at the success all those tanks and airplanes and trillions of dollars had in Afghanistan, for example. I also disagree with the finer points of "guns means freedom", but I don't think yours is a valid argument.
>Just look at the success all those tanks and airplanes and trillions of dollars had in Afghanistan, for example.
Because the average law abiding, fast-food fed Joe Public is gonna fight a full on war? Or get guns, support, and people to come join "the cause" from abroad? Or have any advantage over the government forces in "knowing the area"?
It is said that "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.".
I'd say this idea, that after you are guaranteed worse results, you should double down, is even more insane.
If anything, what I wrote is all the more reason to find new strategies that don't involve "we'll fight them with guns".
Besides who'll do the fighting? The kind of people that have guns are in more in favor of fascism and army rule than those who don't. So all it takes to get them on the side of the opressors it's to sell it to them as army control, as opposed to "big government" control.
> The kind of people that have guns are in more in favor of fascism and army rule than those who don't. So all it takes to get them on the side of the opressors it's to sell it to them as army control, as opposed to "big government" control.
I feel like you have never talked to a gun owner before. Though they may lean towards the pro police/pro military side, they absolutely would not bow to the government implementing some kind of mass martial law.
Lastly, our military swears an oath to the people and the constitution, not the government. Every Soldier, Sailor, Airman, Marine, and Guardsman is bound by oath to refuse unlawful orders. Any hint of stuff like you're talking about would lead to mass revolt within military ranks themselves. Militias would form, and armaments would be taken from the military's caches to launch a resistance.
>I feel like you have never talked to a gun owner before. Though they may lean towards the pro police/pro military side, they absolutely would not bow to the government implementing some kind of mass martial law.
That's what they pay lip service too. In practice the huge majority are chickens, when they're not pro-army (and the first to cheer for an actual martial law, as long it was done by favorable politicians to them).
>Lastly, our military swears an oath to the people and the constitution, not the government. Every Soldier, Sailor, Airman, Marine, and Guardsman is bound by oath to refuse unlawful orders.
Well put. Second-amendment gun fanatics dwell so intently on their fantasies of bravely exchanging fire with government soldiers, when in fact their government has figured out how to oppress people in less physical and more effective ways than direct military action could ever achieve.
Have you ever met a gun owner? Most do not want government overreach, hate facism(the real definition, not the “any Trump supporter” definition the left made up last year), and would outright revolt over a military dictatorship.
Wars are still fought with such arms. It's important to remember that many of the civilians who are proponents of the 2nd Amendment were trained by the military and fought in recent wars; and understand full well what it means to prosecute a modern war.
This constant obsession about the US government potentially launching overt, ground-based military action against its own people makes me envision a doomsday prepper who invests tons of resources into a fallout shelter, but rides a motorcycle without a helmet or something. The risk assessment just doesn't make sense to me at all.
Get with the times: our governments oppress and control us in ways that don't require open conflict. The 1860s are gone forever.
Disclaimer: I've never owned a gun, and I have no military or government experience.
Given what happened in New Orleans, many aspects of prepping (the food and water and all that) are not that stupid. Only have to be without food or water or security once to be dead forever.
I disagree, especially with these quotations, which are disingenuous.
Patrick Henry was a firebrand. His words were meant to incite violence and insurrection for the financial advantage of the order of people to which he belonged.
The Jefferson letter you are quoting[1] doesn't mean what you imply with how you quote it. The real meaning, if you use the sentences right before that, says that some part of the population is always going to be ignorant and misinformed and discontent in proportion to that, and that it's better they rebel openly so they can be corrected, patted on the head, and sent home instead of stewing silently. From that point of view, the people should be minimally armed so this could be accomplished with as little bloodshed as possible.
It's also fraught to impute anything about constitutional matters to Jefferson, since he regarded a constitution perpetuated more than a generation or two as a form of tyranny.
The scholarship on Sparta has been pretty thoroughly revised over the past few decades. Any reference to Sparta rooted before that is of at best suspect legitimacy.
It was a successful delaying action. They were outnumbered hundreds to one and never expected to defeat the entire enemy army themselves. They knew they were going to lose that battle, but the intent was to help win the overall war, which the Greeks did.
And if you kill many more of the enemy than they do of you despite being vastly outnumbered, you can justifiably say you gave a lot more than you got, which is a victory of sorts in its own right.
> And if you kill many more of the enemy than they do of you despite being vastly outnumbered, you can justifiably say you gave a lot more than you got
Getting (benefitting) a lot more than you gave (spent) makes more sense to me.
In this context we're talking about death: giving more death to the enemy than they could give to you. Ultimately the meaning is the same as your rewording. Just a bit more grim.
A different reading of the history is that it was a political move by the other Spartan king to force Leonidas to die in a lost cause with a small force in order to remove a rival.
Or rather: killed a small percentage of Spartans (the "300" + some allies), hardly "the entire Spartan force", while having huge losses themselves, and giving time to the rest of the Greeks to prepare and ultimately kick them off.
I mean, if millions of New Zealanders (and Germans, and Brits, and...) feel like that, why would we expect the US to be any different? (compliance rates for previous gun confiscation efforts overseas have been laughable - like, "I don't think there's been one with over 50% compliance" tier laughable)
The Trump administration actually did this with bump stocks with an administrative determination that bump stocks constitute an automatic weapon. Granted, it wasn't millions, but probably at least tens of thousands of people had a few weeks notice to destroy their bump stocks or be in felony possession of an automatic weapon. At the federal level, this is already more gun control than the Obama administration implemented.
The old "Assault Weapons Ban" grandfathered in existing guns. Since AR-15s and similar rifles are so much more common now its possible that re-instating the ban wouldn't help as much without also implementing a gun buyback. That could in turn be very expensive.
Not necessarily insurmountable, but potentially a significant obstacle.
That just means it will take longer for the full effects to kick in. The gun lobby puts out tons of arguments that amount to "your proposed solution isn't perfect so it shouldn't be done."
The law would be reversed long before it had a chance of actually succeeded.
Lots of people care a whole lot about gun rights. And all you need to do is win 1 Congress and presidency, to temporarily reverse the law, and allow people to purchase these guns again, and reverse all the effects of the law.
Yes, unfortunate but true. And probably true of just about any controversial legislation, meaning whichever direction you want the country to go, over the long term it just swings back and forth.
It was just a few days ago that we saw a study using US LEO data which showed that assault weapon bans do nothing to reduce murder rates, while bans on weapons purchases to people with ANY sort of history of violence, including misdemeanors, has a significant effect. So you are correct.
My current preference would be:
1. A weapons licensing program requiring training and passing a test both on general use and much more heavily on safety and responsibility/ethics. Biennial refresher course for license renewal.
2. A complete ban on gun ownership for any violent crime history or history of mental health issues, or known affiliation with a group classified as a terrorist group or criminal gang, or any other well known factors which significantly increase the risk of gun related murder, allowing unlicensed persons access to your firearms, including mandatory immediate surrender of arms and amo for anyone with a gun license if any of these points should become relevant after the fact.
3. Significant funding for means of identifying other factors that could help reduce gun deaths and implementing laws that integrate such factors once they have been demonstrated, as well as education to help the public at large identify the factors that are statistically relevant to gun deaths.
Yeah, I'm sure black and brown people just won't pass the test. Shocker! Or the facility will be unavailable. Or the paperwork lost. Or it'll cost $500. Or whatever.
That's such a painfully white suggestion - to readily remove liberties so hard won, in a way that will only effect people of color.
You do know gun control has historically only effected black/brown populations right?
It doesn't have to decrease "violent crime", it's enough that it reduces violent murders (in non-crime scenarios, e.g. domestic abuse, mass shootings, etc).
>I don't understand your parenthetical assertion that domestic abuse and mass shootings are not crime. Of course, they certainly are crime.
My point is to separate the actions done by career criminals, (organized crime, burglars, gangs, drug dealers, the mob, etc). As opposed to a casual, accidental, one of, not intended, breaking of the law (even if they committed crime) by an ordinary person who doesn't live off of crime.
(Perhaps the distinction is more powerful in my language, but I think there's a distinction in casual conversation in English too. E.g. you'd call someone who abuses their spouse a "wife beater", or "creep", or "abuser" or several other terms, but you wouldn't say that they lead "a life of crime" (even tho domestic abuse is a crime). The same way you usually wouldn't call a mass shooter a "criminal", but a "deranged person", "psychopath", "terrorist", etc). If I say "criminal" or "outlaw" for example, does that bring in mind someone deep in crime, or a person involved in a DUI?
Anyway, my point is, in a total gun ban, you'll still have the gang/career criminal/etc people have guns and you could even have the same amount of gun crime of that type as now, but you'd have much less murders within a family, mass shootings, etc... -- as it would be way more difficult for lawful people to get their hands on guns, have them casually at home, and e.g. use them on a sudden rage against their spouse or parents or whatever.
(I'd say even the career criminal type of crimes will be less -- criminals will also have a worse and harder supply of guns).
Doesn't take much to find it. You're only a search away. You can't claim to be knowledgeable in the least on this subject if you haven't become across it, even if just to find some of its criticisms .
It really does seem to be that is the position. There are a lot of backwards nutjobs in the government right now, blaming other backwards nutjobs, while the rest of us sane people are trying to duct tape society together.
Guns don't kill people, encryption doesn't kill people, backwards nutjobs kill people. Politics in America, currently, can entirely be summed up as the Spiderman pointing at Spiderman meme.
>...encryption not only can't kill people, it also prevents people from stealing
To be fair, it can also prevent people from being killed in extremely oppressive regimes, just by association with 'x' out-topic (e.g.: the gay community).
And I guess if they are really enterprising they could print off a bunch, build a potato gun analog, and go on a rampage. But then again in the time it takes to print even the single copy in some states they could go to the store and come back with an AR-15 and extended clip.
The position is actually: never let a tragedy or crisis pass by without trying to use it to expand the power of the government.
They have no such actual position regarding encryption killing people, they're entirely flexible, able and more than willing to sway with the wind when it presents. Whether or not encryption kills people, so to speak, is not their concern, it's nothing more than the opportunistic excuse framing. They'll use anything that will stick, anything that gets the result they're seeking.
This was exactly my thought when I read this article. But the scariest thing is that, what US Govt decides have huge implications for the whole world!
Having a backdoor in software NOT only enables US government and other cyber criminals to have access. It also enables other governments like Russian, Chinese, Israilean, North Korean governments too! Keep that in mind too.
Australia has already made way for other nations to follow suit this year. We have a history with low gun violence, encryption or lack thereof had nothing to do with that.
Sure, but your low gun violence didn't just happen. People used to have guns, they liked their guns, but there were shootings. People including politicians realized they could do something about it. Some gun owners hated that, but shootings all but stopped. You're really the example that all "guns don't kill people" arguers hate having to try and explain away.
It's worth pointing out that quoting this list is a little disingenuous. Considering only items on the list starting in 2000, only a third (8) appear to have involved firearms.
Did you even read that list? That list only helps the point. We haven't had a public mass shooting in decades. The more recent incidents have been arson, car attacks, or murders of people known to eachother, and they have had significantly lower impacts.
Of course, my point was just that it had nothing to do with encryption or the recent laws subverting encryption in Australia. It's worth noting, because you can be sure we will be used as an example to try and push these kinds of laws in other countries.
On the plus side, all the IT jobs we're losing here in Australia might come back when the US starts routing all their traffic through here so they can spy on US citizens!
Chinese and Russian governments already got access to every local device, even from Apple itself, with no protest from anyone. Israel can apparently hack into the devices without a backdoor (according to Cellebrite), and isn't a justified part of your list - it's a democracy not a dictatorship. NK doesn't allow any devices, not that it bothers with any excuses.
I really doubt nearly all iPhone users use iCloud. The ones on Hacker News might. I think a regular person would just shrug at prompts to set it up.
I feel like most times I hear iCloud mentioned by non techies they are confused about what it is. Like when their storage is out and they get nagged about it.
Relating the two is provocative. And it just caused me to wonder whether part of difficulty of advocating for privacy might now be that privacy rights advocacy will get blurred with gun rights advocacy, in the minds of people already people fatigued by, and skeptical of, the latter.
How’s this for provocative: if you don’t have a right to a 2nd Amendment, what right do you have to encrypt? After all, encryption has long been classified as munitions by the US government.
yes well... that was a consequence of the last failed attempt to create backdoors with clipper thankfully.. but you could argue encryption is a munition in practice if not by current statute. For instance one could argue without encryption the revolutionary war would have had a different outcome as it enabled Washington’s network of spies to tip the balance in favor of the revolutionaries. But more importantly the point I was tongue in cheek trying to make is twofold: 1) for a right to encryption to exist, an individual must be sovereign. For an individual to be sovereign they must have a right to bear arms. And 2) while there are numerous rights to privacy enumerated in the bill of rights there is not one that I know of that gives an explicit right to encrypt. But if one were to argue encryption as munition... then you’d have the 2nd amendment to support the right.. which as I stated is kind of provocative and that’s all I was trying to be.
Should gun rights advocates promote relating privacy rights to gun rights, I suppose that could spoil the perception of privacy rights among large numbers of US voters.
Maybe, in that scenario, gun-rights voters end up carrying privacy-rights US policy influence, but then we might also have a lot of other US people thinking privacy is not for them, in their own day-to-day lives.
Politics and perceptions are way outside my expertise, but things like this sometimes come to mind when working on technical stuff with privacy&security implications.
I hope y'all realize I can remember a discussion just like this happening 25 years ago on the cypherpunks mailing list. I just wanted to note that before I closed the tab.
More like "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" plus "Pareto is a pain and maybe if we fight encryption we can get public support but we don't want to break it because post hoc analysis doesn't actually help us catch the next guy because Pareto is a pain."
Actually the general consensus in the US government would be that everything kills people and must be regulated by people who don't understand it and who have conflicts of interest. That way people will stop dying.
We(HN commenters) all know that the demonization of encryption is bullshit. What we need to do is to figure out how to communicate that effectively to the public.
"Authorities want every house in America to be remodeled to include a second front door with a special government lock. They promise to only give police departments, contractors, and/or federal employees access to the single master key that can be instantly and easily copied and shared over the internet and opens every single house and business in America. Even if we trusted the government with this power, how could that go wrong?"
You could say the same about a hypothetical encryption backdoor. The question is whether consumers should be allowed to use encryption the FBI can’t crack even with a warrant. I think the answer is “yes”, but…
Right, which is why the locked door is the wrong analogy.
It's more like burying treasure. The location is a secret map (key) that only you know. The critical distinction here, I believe, is between "having" and "knowing".
And I like to believe we have even stronger rights to what we know than to what we have.
All that said, this is assuming use of working cryptography. With the exception of the technically savvy (those who know how to hid things properly) asking for backdoors into encryption is akin to registering your treasure with the feds, something I'd assume gold miners wouldn't have put up with, for example.
I didn't do a good enough job with the analogy. The main problem I want to illustrate is that if the key falls into the wrong hands (which is extremely easy to do), then anyone else can easily enter anyone's home.
There are two main issues: government abusing its power, and weakening security of everybody. I meant to focus more on the second.
I think there are different counters that will resonate for different people:
You can oppose banning/weakening encryption because you believe encryption is an irreplaceable tool for security.
You can oppose banning encryption because you believe that would actually be an ineffective tactic for preventing crime.
You can oppose banning encryption because you believe such bans violate inherent civil liberties.
There's another one that's really hard for me to explain -- You can oppose banning encryption because you've read Shannon or have a general sense of how RC4 worked and it feels just gross to ban basic operations, like shuffling information in a particular way. It's a bit like banning addition, or like banning pig latin.
I hear rebuttals and debates around the first three, but I don't think there's an effective rebuttal to the last one, which is just a paradigm shift. It's like, "I don't support this because I do not understand information the way you do."
Maybe we should print copies of "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" and leave them in hotel rooms, like the Gideons do with Bibles.
In part, we need a better lobby, or more lobbyists, who can break down what the real issues are and effectively explain those to Congress and the government.
Though, this reeks of the Executive branch making a scapegoat out of tech to distract from the gun industry, just like getting Walmart to pull game adverts and talking about "red flag" laws.
Unfortunately, the public response to this will be "Do you not support law enforcement, who risk their lives for our safety?" Sometimes it feels like we've elevated the common cop to a superhuman status.
And gun owners know the demonization of guns is bullshit. Perhaps we could find common cause against government - mandated disarmament instead of trying to shift the blame elsewhere?
We can't expect layman and ordinary people to understand the real consequences and implications of the misinformation and misleading from government and corporations involved in surveillance.
We on HN and every one that really understand the matter will need to keep fight for ourselves and others.
But I believe trying to find a answer to your question a great exercise that contributes very much. I just don't have a good answer.
Maybe something like, they cant even keep our PII safe... what di you think will happened with our key
I'm wondering this too. The person already killed a bunch of people. The person is dead. What more to they hope to gain? Some secret cell of others? Unlikely .. and if there is, why not regular warrants, wiretaps, e-mail searches, etc.
They already have sooo many tools they can use, both with a warrant and bypassing it via FISA. They had all this domestic spying stuff and still couldn't prevent the shooting!
They get nothing with phone access, so why even bother brining up compromising everyone else's security just because they failed to use all their current surveillance means to detect and prevent the shooting to being with?! You want more access? Why? That's fucking unbelievable.
I largely agree that they likely gain little from accessing the phone (though they may further understand motive/sources of radicalisation from what he was looking at before the shooting), but it would seem negligent not to check if they have access to it. It doesn't seem to warrant spending significant resources finding a way into it, though (unless they have reason to suspect the involvement of a third-party), or justify calling for a backdoor.
Probably to understand motive, and check for potential involvement of others.
And whilst they have a metric shit-ton of spying capabilities on US civilians, those are not really intended to avoid crime. (Maybe the shift of perception of what is terrorism might change that, though)
A manifesto isn't necessarily honest. It describes how shooters want the world to view their actions, not necessarily the actual motives behind their actions.
I find lists like those very disingenuous. For example look at source 25 "During an attempted home invasion, shots were fired and four people were wounded". In other words, four criminals tried to rob a home but the resident of the house shot 4 of them and three of them are in the hospital and one has been released to jail.
I wouldn't categories that incident along with the two recent "actual" mass shootings.
So your challenging the definition of a mass shooting they use because it somehow doesn't cohere with your personal thoughts about it. But the problem of defining a mass shooting and that various definitions are controversial is mentioned in the very first paragraph of that page.
I cannot find anything disingenous about choosing an official definition and mentioning that it is problematic in the first paragraph.
I would characterize the home invaders as the "perpetrators" in that particular story and exclude them from the injury count, consistent with the language of that definition.
From the article: Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group that tracks shootings and their characteristics in the United States, defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people, excluding the perpetrators, are shot in one location at roughly the same time.
Ugh, everyone loves to dredge up gun violence archive and use it as an authorative source and it's trash. They deliberately inflate the numbers of "mass shootings" by changing the definition from the FBI definition (itself occasionally modified for political reasons). The net result is that every half assed gangland drive-by with a handgun gets lumped in and people don't understand that. Outside of Chiraq and a couple of other places gun violence doesn't exist in any meaningful capacity. You're literally safer anywhere in America outside of those places than Western Europe. This is absolutely done on purpose to help push an agenda.
"Outside of Chiraq and a couple of other places gun violence doesn't exist in any meaningful capacity. You're literally safer anywhere in America outside of those places than Western Europe."
This is definitely not true. Guns are commonly used in domestic violence situations, or just random household accidents, in a way that poses more danger to Americans everywhere than that experienced by the vast majority of western Europeans (except maybe for those few in the equivalents of their "Chiraqs").
This is getting ridiculous. The reason why these classification of mass shootings was invented (by US Congress) is quite the opposite of what you suggest, namely to make sure that gang-related violence and "ordinary" shootings are included into the statistics Why? So politicians can point to cities like Chicago and argue that the police needs more powers instead of having to deal with the unpleasant reality of amok runs and domestic terrorism which cannot be prevented very easily and are often cited as an argument for tighter gun control.
Of course, you're less likely to get shot in Europe. If you start cherry picking locations, on the other hand, then I guess the US is 100% safe and crime-free, provided you take your mom's basement as reference area.
Yes, they use the official definition of the term "mass shooting", as it was adopted after 2013 by the US congress, which defines it as a shooting with 3 or more victims. Moreover, they mention in the very first paragraph that the definition is controversial and problematic, and they mention all alternative official definitions (e.g. before 2013) explicitly in the following paragraphs.
You probably have another definition in mind, since in your mind "mass shooting" is somehow associated with classic amok runs and terrorism. But how is that a counter-argument to using the official definitions and terms, as they are defined by US congress and used by police and the US judicial system? Why on earth would it be disingenuous for them to base their statistics on the official definitions?
Sure, some people think that e.g. gang-related gun violence shouldn't count as a mass shooting even if many victims are involved, but the US congress chose otherwise and the page makes it crystal clear that the definition is problematic.
> they use the official definition of the term "mass shooting", as it was adopted after 2013 by the US congress, which defines it as a shooting with 3 or more victims.
Is this your citation for the 2013 US Congress definition? (because I don't think it says what you seem to think it says).
To quote: " The term was originally defined as the murder of four or more people with no cooling-off period[1][5] but redefined by Congress in 2013 as being murder of three or more people."
Not only that, at the risk of repeating myself, the page you criticize as being "disingenuous" clearly mentions that definitions of "mass shootings" are controversial and provides 5 alternative definitions in the second paragraph of the article and then lists 7 data sources with definitions of "mass shooting" that either coincides with the one by US Congress or is more stringent (based on the pre 2013 definition).
The page also clearly states that "... only incidents considered mass shootings by at least two of the above sources are listed."
There is absolutely nothing disingenuous about this method.
What you and the people who downvote me cannot get into their minds is that there are official definitions that are used in statistics and that the listing on the Wikipedia page takes a slighly more stringent and narrower definition as a basis to safeguard against criticisms such as yours.
Again, you are of course free to re-define the term "mass shooting" differently from what e.g. the US Congress or Stanford University do, but this would not constitute a valid criticism of the list. How could it? Merely prefering your very personal definition over another one doesn't mean anything, especially if it deviates far from the official use of the term.
If someone commits a mass killing with a gun, then it becomes a mass shooting.
Frankly speaking, it's not clear what this thread is about. According to social constructivism, social reality might change by re-defining terms like "mass shooting", but according to my sense of reality the number of victims doesn't change at all. I can also see no reason why Wikipedia shouldn't base their lists on the 'most official' terms rather than making up their own, as long as they make clear that this includes multiple homicides by gun, which they do.
Wait, I was wrong. The definitions clearly differentiate between number of people shot and number of people killed, and the Wikipedia article is explicit about the sources used and the definitions used by the sources.
There is nothing wrong with the list, but there seems to be some metalinguistic dispute about what's the best definition of "mass shooting."
While most forum disputes are about words, I think that @frittig makes a valid point in questioning whether the lawful shooting of active criminal home invaders ought to be considered a "mass shooting" just because there happened to be a lot of home invaders.
So, yes it's about words in part, but also about concepts.
For my part, all else being equal, for every N criminal home invaders, the optimal number of home invaders repelled by lawful force without injury to innocent civilians is also exactly N. If you want to mix those relatively rare good mass shootings in with other bad mass shootings (the vast majority of them), that's one way to approach things. You could also keep a list of "Things that happened on Tuesdays in history" and it would be a perfectly self-consistent list.
You are apparently looking at this from the perspective of the victims only, but the burglars were also armed and shooting. They have been arrested for it: "... charges including first-degree burglary, conspiracy, shooting with intent to kill and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony" [Oklahoma News 4, emphasis mine]
> good mass shootings in with other bad mass shootings
I'd certainly say that's better methodology than trying to define "good" and "bad" mass shootings and then only list the "bad" ones. (I don't quite see what's good about this shooting anyway, but I suppose you mean that the crime was stopped.)
Violent crime in the USA is at rates about 50% of what it was 30 years ago. The USA is actually a much more civilized country than it’s been for a long time! We just hear more about the problems thanks to the ease of communication nowadays.
Yes, and it always has been. The murder rate per capita in the US has consistently been 5-10x higher than in Europe for the entire 20th century. Long before gun control, social safety nets, the drug war, or any other difference you might want to blame. The US is a low cohesion, high violence society.
As someone who grew up in the US, lived in the EU, Australia and NZ for a number of years, I can say on a day to day basis, it's still pretty much nothing.
The average American rarely ever has to directly confront violence. I've even spent years in major metropolitan areas and the majority of people don't walk around each day anticipating violence. My sister got mugged once, in our small home city, like 20 years ago. I've never personally been mugged or assaulted, but I did have one break in while in NZ (they took all my electronics) and I had a bicycle stolen in Australia.
I haven't lived in "bad parts of town" through (although friends told me I lived in a bad part of town in two places I lived in; but I really feel they were exaggerating) and in high crime areas I'm sure it's different.
But the portrayal the rest of the world sees of America is through a very limited lens. And German or Irish or Chinese person who comes to visit the US will see kids playing in parks, people in the cities walking to work or lunch, others browsing through stores or pumping petrol into their cars and it will generally looks pretty much like every other part of the mid/high income industrialized world.
I spend about 8 months/year in the United States (Silicon Valley) and 4 months/year in Israel. I do "feel" a bit safer in Israel than the U.S. (for example I don't like travelling in San Francisco. I fear for personal safety on the streets and on Muni, and you have to garage your car otherwise it will be broken in to).
But I don't feel like I'm going to get shot in the United States. I have never even heard gunfire in the U.S. (off the shooting range!) and I've lived in Brooklyn and Manhattan, too.
New York didn't even had a (public) police force until the 1850's, with 300k inhabitants. And there was literal brawling between competing police forces for during the first years.
I have no words that let me express my opinion of politicians that are willing to let this go on in a way that doesn't blatantly violate the rules of this site.
Because saying "he's dead so this is the end of the matter" is unwise and it's worrying you're even asking this.
. Were other people involved?
. or other organisations such as extremists organisations?
. Did he have people egging him on (even if totally uninvolved otherwise), or was he a complete loner?
. Is there a hidden motive here that's not obvious?
. Further evidence of stable and rational thinking, or mentally unstable?
. Is it possible he was aided by legal loopholes, or some failures in process that need patching?
. Could he have left any nasty surprises behind?
. Does his behaviour indicate something that would allow prediction of similar crimes and perhaps their thwarting?
. Photos/films of something of interest like supporters, discussions of further action, whatever
In this case, once a crime is committed, all info needs to be gathered. I'm saying that as someone who is disturbed at extensions of state powers, but once there's a crime, I'm all for picking up everything and analysing it.
Sure it would be nice to have access to the phone, but it is just one of many pieces of evidence that may be gathered, and mostly it is redundant with other sources. If he used the phone for contacting co-terrorists there are trails in many other locations, unless he really knew how to hide his tracks, in which case it is unlikely that he would have left any trails on his phone either.
The main means of communication other than face-to-face is telephone calls and this newfangled web with its many features. Both are provided by a modern smart phone, which most people seem to live through. Therefore you can expect most to all non-F2F comms to go through the phone (typically; not necessarily).
So I can't accept what you say (yet).
> If he used the phone for contacting co-terrorists there are trails in many other locations
These being? You can move about freely in the states, and he was a domestic terrorist.
> unless he really knew how to hide his tracks
Agreed, but it seems most domestic terrorists are bad planners or stupid AFAICS. People like Ted Kaczynski seem to be the exception, most are idiots who will boast online or ask "how can i maek teh THTP" from google.
I care greatly about privacy but when there is legal cause as people have died, my feelings are the law must have access. It is a balance though, and USAins may draw the line differently from brits like me.
> I care greatly about privacy but when there is legal cause as people have died, my feelings are the law must have access. It is a balance though, and USAins may draw the line differently from brits like me.
I draw the line on the side of privacy. I'm absolutely fine with potential unresolved loose ends in a criminal investigation if it means we actually get to practice real security and gain all the privacy that entails.
Regardless of that, I'm not convinced that the actionable information they could obtain is unique to the phone; there are always several avenues of inquiry for evidence-gathering. It smacks of laziness by law enforcement to suggest it's somehow impossible without encryption backdoors.
The reason you're getting downvoted is it seems like you believe encryption should be illegal unless it has a govt backdoor. Encryption is just math, so it's a hard thing to criminalize and to enforce. Furthermore, if the government has a backdoor to all encrypted data then that means China and Russia and any independent hacker would be also searching for that same backdoor and once they find it everyone's screwed. It's really impractical to think that the government could enforce backdoors into all encryption and it'd be exceptionally dangerous if they required all US companies to comply with backdoored encryption. Not to mention the privacy implications of never being safe from government surveillance.
Nah, I'm pretty sure I'm getting downvoted because people don't want to answer questions like, what if it was people killed who mattered to you, or, exactly what other avenues of evidence gathering?
It's the online version of turning away with an angry huff because they don't like where this is going.
OK, back to your point, and thanks for a decent response. The encryption issue is difficult and I made it clear I was ambivalent eg. "I care greatly about privacy...". I fully understand the implications of a legal backdoor, and I don't want it [x]. But if phones are the main comms tool now, and if further killings are pending and can be prevented, at least ask the questions.
So I'm wondering if there is some compromise or something. Some way of putting a backdoor in which a 2nd party has a key to (not the gov't). Or something. Yes I'm aware that gov'ts may unfairly lean on the 2nd party. Is there some way through this? Let's try to be creative.
Perhaps this is a mathematically way of proving, based on some assumptions, that I can't have what I want then we can stop wasting time on it and we can get on with the fight against government strong-arming.
Can we at least have a conversation on it without angry, downvote'y silences? This isn't a constructive. It gets us nowhere.
edit, add clarification [x] that if a compromise can't be found and I had to choose between the government having backdoors or not, I'd fall pretty rapidly on the side of Fuck, No. They will be abused. I probably know this better than you.
The truth is that hypothetically we already probably possess enough intelligence to pick out the whack jobs as a class but not which of them is definitively going to actually going to go off.
However we have consistently shown that we are often incapable of competently using that information even when say the family members of a terrorist call us on the telephone and forewarn us let alone when the worrisome info is buried in a mountain of data.
We don't need less privacy or better technology to gather intel. We actually need a smarter system and better tools to sift the mountain of data we actually already possess.
I'm not the OP but its hard to be particular about alternative means of gathering evidence that is itself hypothetical.
For example if you wanted to know who the person associated with he almost certainly communicated with people in a way that could be obtained by serving a warrant to his ISP.
If you want to know what influenced him looking at his web traffic would be advantageous.
Instead of working backwards from hypothetical lets reason the correct way. What evidence do we have that compelling evidence exists on this particular device.
You put up an argument which you haven't acknowledged was vacuous, and from that extrapolated that I somehow must want backdoors even when I clearly said "Fuck, No" to them in an earlier post[1] which you must have read because you replied to it[2]
Honest question, what am I supposed to make of this?
Normal phone calls are logged by telephone companies, emails can be acquired from most providers, Google and other ad companies will have a pretty detailed history of general web use. In short, your phone does almost nothing without some server recording it.
> I care greatly about privacy but when there is legal cause as people have died, my feelings are the law must have access.
You can't have both, if there is a backdoor, it is always there, and it will be used for lots of stuff.
Agreed. In another post I said the same thing. That's why I'm against backdoors. If the cops want to access someone's account just because, well they can make sweet luuurve to themselves with an pineapple.
If that person has done murdered a handful of people I want the cops to get access, strictly permitted by a legal, independent entity that people can feel they can trust, as far as is possible. I'm trying to get a conversation going as to how that can be done, if even possible. It's not going well!
That is the definition of a backdoor, you can't have a piece of encryption that can only be broken if a court says so. You can have multiple keys, and give one to some entity of government, but there is no guarantee that they won't abuse it or leak it or lose it.
> you can't have a piece of encryption that can only be broken if a court says so
yes dammit, that's why I stated I'm against backdoors. I'm not stupid, prime factoring difficulty (or equivalent) is seemingly a fundamental feature of the universe not subject to the will of man, stop assuming I'm stupid.
> and give one to some entity of government, but there is no guarantee that they won't abuse it or leak it or lose it.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH! they will abuse it! I said so! Has all sentience been sucked out of this thread? Has every last neuron here been devastated?
I'm fed up with this. Discourse here is like the offspring of The Golem and Sisyphus - witless strength of one and the relentless compulsion of the other becoming a novel synergy of turbo-futility where fuck all gets done but in increasingly impressive quantities.
People complain about society. Hint: we are all society.
DanG, if (ok, when) you're reading this, sorry about this. Flag away. I'm tired.
Anyone who wants to commit a serious crime with the help of others will physically destroy the evidence that leads to those helpers before committing the crime. Getting the phone data after the crime has been committed is not going to help preventing these crimes.
Terrorists have been on the radar of secret agencies and police in countless cases. Unfortunately, if the police interviews a potential terrorist or mass killer for "behavioral irregularities" or whatever you call it, this will only radicalize the person more and prevent nothing. Or, at least, it is not a very effective intervention. If there is no crime, the police cannot do much.
To be clear, the NSA could probably easily eavesdrop into all cell phone activity within the US and collect heuristic indicators, and it's very likely that they could predict most of these mass shootings quite well based on these indicators. The problem is that this would be unconstitutional and based entirely on thought crimes like "conspiring to commit a terrorist attack". The laws for this are in place and used against international terrorism, but they are highly problematic and shouldn't be extended to domestic terrorism.
Social workers and maybe mental health support by people who do not have to report to the police probably work much better against radicalization and decrease the probability of an incident. I might be wrong but my guess is that in the US almost zero efforts are spent by social services to improve the social situation of right wing gun nuts and de-radicalize them. Again, no need for getting what's on their phone.
They can't admit "crazy person with a gun" because they suggests that maybe fewer people should carry guns; better to find a narrative that lets then describe each one as desired: white person "angry, money problems" so change nothing; brown person "radicalised alien" , deport and toughen immigration".
You can't be forced to give your password (self-incrimination), but, depending on the jurisdiction, the police can force your finger on the unlock screen.
The technology is a bit hush-hush, but it is already possible to read brainwaves, and "interrogate" someone through fMRI. Just thinking about your password may reveal it, if they are allowed to force your brain near a reader.
The first serious (public) ventures into this technology was around 2000. Advances in machine learning then made it possible to read objects and concepts that were not in a training set. It was used and tested extensively in Guantanamo Bay. The legal status is still ambiguous, but I guess that it is used just in very special cases (where the detainment itself may be legally ambiguous, such as at a black site).
I agree. BUT - the response will be: “well even if we wanted to, we don’t have the technology to read his brain. we DO have the technology to read his phone, but you nerds are keeping it from us.”
(Disclaimer: I don’t agree with this position but I have a lot of friends who think the government can do no wrong)
It's not a perfect analogy. The problem with the "back door" is that these keys will leak. They always do. It's a big danger to have a weakness in all our devices that we know, eventually, Russia, China, or Iran will get their hands on.
Law enforcement needs to go back to old-school detective techniques if they really need that phone data. Encryption is code, code is speech. Encryption keeps banks safe from criminals.
Are we going to go through this for every administration now?
Even if you do not have a problem with giving government keys to, say, the iPhone, then you have to deal with every piece of software someone writes to enable encryption.
You'd literally have to convince every person in the world to not write or use encryption software in "the wrong" ways. And, that's impossible because encryption exists to protect society from criminals. I don't see another way around this.
"Are we going to go through this for every administration now?"
No. Nobody cares about this or that shooter (there'll be another one next week) but the next time there's a 9/11 you can be sure encryption will feature in the news and in a subsequent law.
“It is prudent to anticipate that a major incident may well occur at any time that will galvanize public opinion on these issues ... Whether we end up with legislation or not, the best course for everyone involved is to work soberly and in good faith together to craft appropriate solutions, rather than have outcomes dictated during a crisis.” -- AG William Barr, July 23 2019
"Never let a good crisis go to waste" -- Winston Churchill, probably
Of course. The FBI always claims this shit because in their opinion no longer having access to everyone’s data is “going dark” and throughout history they have always had complete access to everyone and everything.
They don’t stand here saying “we need to deal with white supremecists”, they say “we need the ability to violate everyone’s rights”. They already have a public track record of mass illegal surveillance.
“ultimately measured in a mounting number of victims — men, women and children who are the victims of crimes, crimes that could have been prevented if law enforcement had been given lawful access to encrypted evidence,"
I don't understand this. How would getting into his phone post facto stop the shooting? Do they have a time machine?
Maybe they believe that he was communicating with other people who are planning similar attacks, and they believe they could stop those attacks before they happen if they had access to the Dayton guy's phone.
Folks are actually downvoting my comment; please carry on. But why I'm the hell do you want the government to be able to have unwarranted access to your devices?
Previously any letter you sent was not copied,read and stored in a searchable format by the FBI/via/nsa. Maybe if you were targeted but not wholesale dragnet. Now it is and even more accessibility is being asked. This is a kgb dream machine.
You're not supposed to think critically or ask any questions. Just quietly go about your life, be an obedient citizen, don't make any ruckus, and, of course, trust the government -- they know what's best for you and me and have nothing but our best interests in mind! Unfortunately, they won't be able to stop all of the pedophile terrorists from getting to us if they don't have access to everything. They're "going dark", remember!?
Why don't you want to give them this access anyways? Just what is it that YOU are hiding? What don't you want them to see?
---
> ... crimes that could have been prevented if law enforcement had been given lawful access to encrypted evidence.
That's an earlier quote from Barr (prior to these shootings).
The implication is that if they had access to all of the encrypted communications in real-time (iMessages, WhatsApp, etc.) that law enforcement maybe could have prevented these deaths from happening (nevermind their "track record" for preventing these types of incidents or the fact that most of these shootings are conducted by a single person)...
...but if they aren't able to read all of our messages then of course they can't do anything and so people will continue to die.
FTA: "The cost of encryption is “ultimately measured in a mounting number of victims — men, women and children who are the victims of crimes, crimes that could have been prevented if law enforcement had been given lawful access to encrypted evidence,".
By the same reasoning, had the shooter ran away because he drove a car faster than police ones, we should ban all sports cars then?
If the NSA can’t keep foreign intelligence from stealing its encryption keys, how can we expect the government to protect any backdoor into our devices? I’m not willing to trade ownership of my phone and my bank accounts to the government on some promise they’ll use it to keep me safe. Only an idiot would take that bargain.
> FBI tells lawmakers it can't access Dayton gunman's phone
Lawmakers tell FBI it's too late the dead don't come back to life, and ask what the fuck were they all doing before the massacre given all the warning signs (regarding both the shooter and the readily availability of firearms for purchase)...
I want to know what changed between 2016, when the FBI bought a tool to hack the San Bernardino shooters iPhone[1] for $900,000[2] and now — with presumably an up-to-date iPhone running 2019 iOS — that forced them to come to this conclusion.
That was an iPhone 5C, which did not have a Secure Enclave. Apparently it is/was easier to image the device to brute force passcode attempts at high speed.
There are technical articles out there explaining it in more detail. On my phone now or would paste some URLs.
50 years from now: AG Joe Bare said in a speech last month that FBI couldn't access recordings of the felons thoughts because the opted out from brain chip implant; he further said that the practice of letting some individuals hiding their thoughts from authorities has a high cost of mounting number of victims, some of whom are kids. He added that the 1st amendment gives far too much freedom and needs to be rethought in the changed society.
this will escalate quickly. figure 5 years or fewer until we see laws that have insanely harsh penalties (20 years in prison) for using non-backdoored encryption.
This will not work for many reasons, most importantly:
- Key escrow or government-enabled crypto doesn't work
- Creating classes of encryption doesn't work (Excluding a group and not allowing them to use the same crypto as another group)
- If someone is going to do something unlawful, they will use something else that isn't accessible by the government; take away phone encryption and they will simply use something else
Unless those points are solved, the whole 'should we allow it' discussion is pointless anyway.
Tacking on to that: most of that stuff doesn't work because you can't really physically enforce it; it's an intellectual barrier which due to the way we can simply talk to each other as humans is super easy to circumvent. This was tried with export controls, but that didn't actually work for the information itself; only for commercial products.
If they got access but don't find anything of interest, it's of no use to them to let folks know they can access the phone. It will only make the paranoid more paranoid.
Access to the phone I think is overrated. Getting access to social media accounts, email accounts, text message, chatting apps, and cloud backup probably gives them more than 80% of what they need.
I take it that without the phone data they can't prove that the "suspected gunman" was the person who committed the crime? Perhaps the next suspected gunman will destroy his phone before the crime, or maybe not own one in the first place, so perhaps destroying or not owning phones needs to be made illegal.
There was just a thread on here about the attack surfaces of an iPhone. While the article didn't mention the brand of phone one wonders if it's possible to access the phone or at least plant phone unlocking malware via an sms or mms message.
Why is this even an FBI case? What exactly makes this an FBI case? Why we want this to be an FBI case?
I don't know much about American law. I was under impression that things are reserved to states unless important reason for them to be handled on federal level.
I'm curious about Macs. If I have Firmware Password and FileVault enabled, is it same FBI-proof as iPhone? Does T1 and T2 chips or absent Tx chip (older Macs) make difference? Is storing FileVault unlock key in iCloud makes difference?
I’m not sure how FileVault is implemented, but so long as your key is derived solely from your passphrase and not stored outside your brain (iCloud can be subpoenaed) the strength of your encryption should be proportional to the strength of your passphrase. Computers have less of a reason to use the baked-in CPU or security chip data in deriving the encryption key because longer passwords are more feasible on a laptop than a phone, so brute force attacks are already not likely to succeed.
The only difference I can think of is the ease of an offline brute force attack due to the fact that you can remove a hard drive somewhat easily and then image it and use an entire datacenter’s power at attacking the passphrase. But a strong passphrase (note, not a password) stored only in your head should be quite secure.
FileVault 2 Recovery key is 120 bit, I guess not feasible to bruteforce? Actual low level key is 256-bit XTS-AES. Still unsure what is the process of converting typed login password to low level key.
As with all strategic information, they could still possess the ability to backdoor / crack this phone but deem that ability a strategic asset. Only using it in private or when the stakes are much higher than an already committed crime.
This is maybe the only response to a heinous act like a mass shooting that is more despicable and pathetic than wrapping an event like this around a politically charged baseball bat.
More so than even using this event to claim that "guns are the problem" or the sole factor in this issue.
We all know the FBI can access the information on this phone, they're just playing into the hands of emotional trauma and emotionally driven people who are ill informed to de-value the perceived sanctity of privacy and data security...
The country was founded after an ~8.5 year long Revolutionary War from a colonial owner with a large, well-funded, well-equipped, occupying army. The founders (aka the treasonous colonists) had a general "the people are individually and collectively supreme to the federal government" attitude (no doubt significantly in reaction to the monarchy that ruled over them immediately prior) and wrote the following text into the founding documents:
2nd amendment:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
10th amendment:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The first 10 "amendments", which are roughly/essentially contemporaneous with the original document, are referred to as the "Bill of Rights".
The right to bear arms is also part of the 1689 English Bill of Rights. It is a really old right, dating back to the 900s in various forms on the British Isles.
Roughly 30% of the population owns guns, and has everyday experience with people owning assault rifles who aren't a harm to anyone. The gun culture is the locus of a lot of important values in the US -- service to the country, acceptance of danger, self control, precise and accountable behaviour -- and gun owners are overall more law abiding than the general population. Gun owners haven't done anything wrong and don't see why they need to be punished.
So gun owners feel punished when their guns are taken away, and they feel this punishment is more severe than all the lives that are taken away because of mass shootings? And all the families that are ripped apart?
If my 'right' harms so many people, I would not even want that 'right' in the first place.
Guns perhaps made sense in an era where you had to protect yourself agains outlaws. Now we have governments to take take care of your daily security. Now the freely available guns don't make any sense at all.
Guns don't need to make sense -- in a free country people don't need to justify their actions. Rather, the government needs to be able to justify its policies -- we need to be able to show that the trouble and expense we are putting people to makes a real difference.
So gun owners feel punished when their guns are taken away, and they feel this punishment is more severe than all the lives that are taken away because of mass shootings?
The underlying thinking here is a kind of collective punishment trading or social bargaining; but that's not generally how regulating dangerous stuff works. There are lots of things that kill comparable numbers of people to guns. Do I need to list them? Generally with things that most people use safely but some people use in a way that gets them or others killed, we don't try to ban them but instead we:
(a) Criminalise misuse adjacent to death based on data (not based on emotion or intuition about what seems "dangerous" to uninformed people). For example, criminalising drunk driving because although it doesn't always kill people, it certainly kills them all out of proportion to other driving.
(b) Introduce restrictions in venue that are conducive to safety.
(c) Try to educate the public and post warnings.
(d) Opportunistically encourage people to delegate responsibility to make things safer, even if we don't change their rights overall. For example, Uber seems to reduce drunk driving deaths; but that was not accomplished by either taking people's cars away or preventing them from drinking.
With regards to guns, there simply is no data to support the idea that assault rifles are more deadly than other weapons; or that other things which leftists oppose -- open carry, 30 round magazines -- lead to much change in the overall rate of gun deaths. Banning these kind of things makes about as much sense as banning liquor that's "too strong" because you tried it and "no sane person would like it".
Rifles are rarely a cause of murder, suicide or accidental death. Yes, they are used in mass shootings -- they aren't used in much else. Do you know how rare mass shootings actually are, and how small a cause of death mass shootings actually are? If we took the same approach to other small causes of death as you are proposing taking with regards to assault rifles, what are the policies we might have?
What definition of mass shootings are you actually using? How frequently are assault rifles used in them? There is a lot of variation in the way they are counted so it's hard to talk about the real impact of what you're proposing.
> The gun culture is the locus of a lot of important values in the US -- service to the country, acceptance of danger, self control, precise and accountable behaviour
I have a hard time understanding what does acceptance of danger and self-control have to do with assault rifles? Can't those be exerted with a pistol?
Also I fail to understand how people don't see guns as a liability. Just having one in the house would cause me a lot of headache. Guns can be stolen, kids might find it etc..
What you are trying to do here, is find some justification for guns; but that is not how a free country works. We don't need to ask the government permission to do stuff. We can still do things without having a good reason.
Not sure what policy you're proposing but whatever it is, it needs justification -- that's what limited government is about. No restrictions without reasons.
I'm not proposing any policy. Trying to assess if having assault guns causes more problems than it solves, considering it's hard to keep control of who buys/sells them in a country of 300M+ population. That would probably stand for a justification, wouldn’t it?
We’re also forbidden to keep plutonium or enriched uranium in our basement regardless of what we use it for.
Hell there’s many free countries where it’s illegal to possess weed.
It seems like you’re obliquely arguing for something, since you say “it’s hard to keep control of who buys/sells them” and offer this as justification, but justification for what, exactly?
I don’t think it’s reasonable to look at service pattern rifles in isolation to try to sort out whether they are a problem. They don’t seem to be a major contributor to gun deaths, overall — rifles of all descriptions contribute ~5% of gun deaths every year in the US. Their potential danger may seem great but the data does not bear that out.
samsonradu asks> "Can you please elaborate on why guns are so sacred in the US? Is it for cultural/historical reasons?"
FWIW use of the term "sacred" is somewhat iffy as many an atheist has picked up a gun to defend himself.
America was taken over and settled by Europeans who brought firearms for hunting and protection. There were already 20-100 million indigenous American Indians here: they covered the land. But the Europeans brought diseases that few American Indians had resistance to, and most (up to 90%) of the American Indians died of disease before they had so much as _seen_ a white man. Indian societies collapsed and re-coalesced from the fragments. Meanwhile...
Newly-arrived Europeans advanced into a "wilderness" that held the burnt-out remnants of multiple civilizations. Only the very earliest arrivals saw the destruction their diseases had wrought in front of their advance.
With the Europeans came ideas of real estate (ownership rights to land etc.) which the American Indian tribes previously maintained by allegiances and territorial behavior. Anyway, conflicts ensued, new allegiances formed, broke and reformed. This all involved conflicts, fighting and wars. In every step, guns were used by both sides (e.g., American-Indian Wars, Revolutionary War, Civil War).
Early settlers were often on their own. They often had disputes and unpleasant encounters with their own and others. The gun could be used for protection as well as an important food-gathering tool. Although the American Indians could do so easily, living in the wilderness without a firearm was difficult and rare for someone of European descent.
So the use of firearms goes back to the pre-colonial and colonial periods. Guns were always available in the New World and remain available today.
So the us doesn't end up like countries such as Romania, where the government can easily subdue its population with a simple good beating. It’s harder to subdue an armed population.
Does that even make sense from a technical perspective?
They are talking about a PIN code to unlock the phone to access the data on the phone. Could they not just remove the memory chip and access it directly? Even if the data on it is encrypted using a 6-digit PIN, brute-forcing that should be a trivial task.
If it’s an iPhone, the data is encrypted with a key derived from the PIN and a random key that is baked into the phone’s CPU. The CPU has instructions for encrypting and decrypting with this secret key but no instruction for reading the key directly. Short of decapping the chip and going in with an electron microscope to figure out what this key is, your only option is to brute force on the phone’s own CPU. But that CPU won’t run software that isn’t signed by the manufacturer, and that software imposes ever-increasing timeouts when unlock attempts fail.
So why don't they decap the chip and go in with an electron microscope? Has that type of exploit ever been successfully used against modern devices, or is it only a theoretical vulnerability?
How much time and effort would it take to go from a chip under an electron microscope to the embedded crypto key, though? Seems like a substantial reverse engineering effort. (Although only for the first time you do a particular type of chip.)
An electron microscope alone won’t work not to mention you have a high likelihood of damaging to chip as the voltage of the electrons deposited on the sample can exceed what the IC can tolerate.
You need a cryo probing station of some sort I’m not sure if these even exist for 12/10/7nm logic yet.
Usually, you don't want to work with the original, only on copies. Here we are talking about a one shot attempt to get info by destroying the hardware... I can see those people searching for any other way first.
>In the US, there are more firearms than people. About one-third of all households have at least one firearm
Nothing than
1) a total banning of sales,
2) a law that requires existing owners to return them for destruction,
3) 5 years jail minimum time for anybody even seen with one (and 20 years if they were involved in any criminal act while carrying it, regardless of the act),
And it has an added benefit of a more pliable populace as the riffraff were forcibly removed and the remmnants are scarred and scared or simply overjoyed at finally arriving at the "no guns for lil people nirvana".
>We are literally talking about millions of people who would refuse to follow this law
Wouldn't then they be criminals?
There are millions of people who have been in jail (even for BS like marijuana, which killed far less people than guns, well, literally 0 people), so what would be special about them?
>Seems like you are doing some sort of poes law parody of a gun grabber.
A lot of people justify genocide by calling the targets of their mass murder "criminals".
We are absolutely not killing millions and millions of people in the US right now, as you are advocating for.
No 1st world country is doing anything even close to what you are advocating, which is whole scale mass murder, on the same level of number of deaths, as all of the horrible genocides that the world talks about.
Your suggestion of mass murder against millions and millions of people is well outside the realm of anything that 1st world country is even coming close to doing, and you can expect 10s of millions to fight this crazy mass mass murder plan.
You'd probably have to kill not just the gun owners, but also all these 10s of people in pretty much every major 1st world country, as well, who vowed to never let anything like that happen again, who would fight back in the civil war that you created. (such a civil war would cause more deaths than all mass shootings in the entire world, put together, 10 times over)
Notice how the this obsession with "mass murder" is yours.
I've suggested a no-deaths-whatsoever, totally legal process: make guns illegal, and have people hand them in to police. Peacefully. (In fact, to sweeten the deal, I'll now add that they will then get their money back (the price of the guns), plus a lollipop).
To which you obsess that "Most/millions of gun owning people will never hand them in, even if it's made illegal to have a gun" and then pretend that the only alternatives are "gun ownership allowed" and "mass murder of millions".
> Notice how the this obsession with "mass murder" is yours
Of course I am obsessed with preventing mass murder. People said never again, and they meant it.
You are the one saying "oh, they are just criminals".
> have people hand them in to police
People will not hand them in. You'd have to kill them, by the millions (oh, and also you'd have to kill the 10s of millions who merely oppose death squads)
That's the reality of the situation. Millions of people in the US aren't going to hand in their guns to the government, and would rather face the government death squads.
So you can either be happy with an ineffective law that millions aren't going to follow, or you can take the death squads option, and good luck with that, because that's also not going to work.
It's not even about freedom. The NSA and FBI would love to get legislation in place that weakens encryption, but the fact of the matter is you can't weaken encryption without breaking it.
Your options are basically to either force everyone to use short keys that can be brute forced by the NSA (and anyone with cash to throw at AWS) or to set up a trusted-third party to store everyone's private keys and then either enforce long key lives or come up with a mechanism to transport the keys to the third party as old ones expire.
Weakening encryption would lead to massive issues for both corporate and personal security. What's worse is there wouldn't be anything stopping anyone from rolling their own crypto without the NSA's permission (it's literally just math), so it'd be business as usual for terrorists and black-hats.
To be honest, the solution here is different. Just allow for signed firmware that uses the TPM without a time-lock.
Similar things could be done for many forms of encryption at rest secured by a TPM based on a PIN or fingerprints. (Though I am not sure about fingerprints).
This can essentially be done without key escrow. Though you could see this as key escrow where the signing key for code that accesses the TPM as the master key.
One could argue that it's harder to make an institution that has the power to access secured devices behave than it is to change society to have fewer mass murderers.
To quote the onion: ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
Yeah. Let’s take away a specifically enumerated constitutional right to better protect, maybe, one that appears only in the “penumbras” of the document.
I honestly don't know what your position is because the right against unreasonable searches and seizures and right to arms are both specifically enumerated in the fourth and second amendments, respectively.
Requiring manufacturers to include back doors to be used only pursuant to a valid warrant would not be a “search.” (There might be a commerce clause issue, though.) Many types of surveillance typically does not involve a search (because it relies on data that either can be gleaned from public activity or through cooperating third parties).
Code can have elements of speech, but it’s primarily functional, and that functionality can be regulated. A building can be art, but that doesn’t mean building codes can’t be used to e.g. require parking accommodations.
Mass surveillance is unreasonable search. Court-ordered passphrase disclosures are compelled speech and forced self-incrimination. Equipment is seized from innocent people willy-nilly.
The "right to privacy" refers to a bundle of other rights the state is already spitting all over in direct and obvious violation of the Constitution, and our judiciary is wasting the blood of our great nation's many dead martyrs.
That said, I believe privacy is such a lost cause at this point rayiner might still be arguing effectively for our remaining rights by throwing it to the dogs while they're sniffing for our guns.
Gun murder rate per gun ownership rate is still vanishingly low in Vermont and most of the Rocky Mountain states, despite high rates of legal gun ownership
Rights are more important than lives. The United States has spent the lives hundreds of thousands of soldiers in defense of those rights. We should no more surrender those rights to fear and alarmism than we would surrender them to a foreign invader.
what is on his phone that can't be found online or through his browsing history tracked by google et. al.? you have all his contacts as well through various nsa pen registers and whatnot.
seems like more or less a move to create a "think of the kids or innocents" moment to keep things from "going dark".
My definition of freedom is that no initiated force is allowed.
That includes no forcing tech companies to put backdoors in their phones.
I'm OK with retaliatory force used in self defense, and I consider having a government and having taxation to fund it to fall under that umbrella. So I'm not an anarchist. Rather, I'm a certain breed of classical liberal.
If there were clear and transparent -- like public -- procedures -- by which the FBI could get into an iPhone, it might be alright. Say that if they broke into the iPhone it was indelibly marked -- it flipped a flag in the hardware and there was no way to disguise it, and the OS would broadcast it over the web and over BlueTooth and WiFi, making it easy to provide tools that caught the message and published it. Then people lose their privacy, but only if the government is willing to defend in a credible way the necessity of it.
Other than all the other psychos who kill a lot more people but are considered legitimate in their doings... We need more access to their information, drug companies making opiates that kill tens of thousands, various other corporations, various world leaders... etc. If we can tolerate them, then we can tolerate your run of the mill psycho doing things now and then and usually immediately being stopped from doing anything else.
Please try to use a different example. I have CRPS, the most painful disease known to man, and have not been prescribed any analgesics two years in because of fear around opioids. You might think you’re excluding my ilk when examples like this are used but you’re not in practice...Just trading tragedy you know for tragedy I hope you never learn about. Almost exactly like the freedom from unreasonable searches. Ty
How about a dated signed explanation that had to passed around and signed by a bunch of public institutions. Heck, to keep other countries from complaining, some could be an international.
This disgraceful, emotionally manipulative statement is an obvious lie. Police/FBI/etc have have access to far more information about criminals than any point in history. The average person (criminals included) leaves behind an incredible amount of "digital exhaust". They should be able to build a complete pattern-of-life easily with 3rd party data (e.g. ad tracking), various side channels, and the massive amount of metadata[1] recorded every time criminals used their phone.
Of course, using all of that data to find a criminal requires actual detective work specific to each case. Encryption (especially on a phone examined after a crime) isn't preventing law enforcement from investigating crimes; it is, however, harder to automate. This anti-encryption argument is really about automated mass surveillance, not finding specific criminals.
[1] "We kill people based on metadata" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdQiz0Vavmc