NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/sci/crypt/4857

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-16 | 3.9 KB

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From: [e-mail]
Newsgroups: sci.crypt,alt.privacy,comp.org.eff.talk
Subject: Re: A Silver Bullet to Limit Crypto?
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 16 Nov 92 13:41:49 GMT
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In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail]
(Carl Ellison) writes:
| In article <[e-mail]>
[e-mail] writes:
|| [...]   There is also a price
||to be paid for LE losing the ability to wiretap that I don't think is
||well understood.
|
|
| Before the invention of electrical communication, people ensured their
| privacy of conversation by looking for people within earshot.
|
| Now, however, people have the illusion of privacy. [Imagine someone
| whispering into a cellular phone.]
|
| That privacy is returning to reality, gradually.
|
| This means that law enforcement (LE) and crooks alike have had a brief
| period (150 yers?) of easy access to what was intended to be private
| conversations -- such that the tapper had little likelihood of being
| discovered.
|
| When this brief period finally comes to an end, LE will have to go back to
| doing what it did before.
|
| What was that -- or was it so long ago that people have forgotten?

It was nothing that you would recognize in modern terms.

People like to think yesterday was just like today, but with horses instead of
cars.  We see so many TV shows and movies that show modern people dealing with
modern situations, just dressed in older garb.

The modern idea of police is historically quite new - no more than 100 or so
years old.  What I'm including in the modern idea is the role of police as
the INVESTIGATORS of crime.  The traditional exclusive role of the police goes
back to the days of the King's guard:  The police maintained order.  (In fact,
those wonderful words at the beginning of the sow Law and Order - "The police
apprehend criminals; the prosecuters try to convict them" - or however it is
stated - is a reflection of a pervasive illusion.  In fact, most of any cop's
job has nothing to do with arresting offenders.  The cop on the beat has huge
discretion about when to arrest, and he uses it all the time.  Only some
small fraction of situations where a cop COULD have arrested someone actually
leads to an arrest.  Only a small fraction of those actually are ever tried.)

Society 150 years ago was much simpler.  The nature of most crime was very
immediate - the assault on a public way, the burglary.  However, there was
also much less to steal:  Outside of money and jewelry, most things of value
were harder to move and hide.

The large-scale white-collar crimes that we see today were rarer (since the
scale of business was smaller) and generally not crimes:  The "robber barons"
generally operated within the law as it then existed.  The idea that is per-
vasive in the US today - that any wrong must be righted by the courts - has
been growing gradually, but certainly goes back no further than the 1930's.

The 1850's were a wonderful time to live, if you were among the wealthy.  If
you were in the US living on the frontier, you had a great deal of freedom -
and essentially no protection from anything, natural or human.  If you were
anywhere else in the world, you were poor and had neither freedom nor
protection as we would recognize these concepts today.

                            -- Jerry