Why is it so important that individuals be free to communicate privately without the ability for government of law enforcement to intercept, even with a warrant or subpoena?
To begin with, it's important to understand how digital wire-tapping is evolving. It is moving away from the traditional process where communication is targeted on an individual basis, to a more wholesale or data mining approach. In this approach, huge volumes of digital communication are aggregated, and sophisticated data processing techniques are used to "discover" patterns or connections. In turn, these discoveries can be used to either predict potential malicious activity or be used after the fact to corroborate other existing evidence.
In short, law enforcement (in particular at the federal level) are finding these types of aggregated approaches to be extremely effective, resulting in unprecedented investments by the FBI and Defense Department to collect and analyze data in this fashion.
The first lesson to be drawn from this trend is that going forward, the government will be very keen on blocking personal communication from being end-to-end encrypted and thus outside of this kind of general data collection. In fact, they are already pressuring major ISP's to somehow block this kind of communication (see for example this recent initiative from the FBI.) The question here is, do they have a legitimate position? Is there a legitimate argument to be made that the government should be able to collect this kind of personal communication for the purposes of national security and law enforcement?
The second important consideration is the track record government and law enforcement have in restricting interception activities to those specifically associated with an ongoing investigation or legitimate threat. That is, if we do hand over this kind of wholesale access to the government, do we have reason to trust that they will use this data for legitimate purposes only? This is a complicated question. For one initial perspective, see this overview regarding NSA activities along these lines from the EFF.
Finally, it is important to consider what might be called a "cooling effect". That is, if you knew or had reason to believe that the government was intercepting or monitoring your personal communication would it have an effect on the manner in which you communicate? Personal communication, or really, how we communicate with other people, is a foundation of who and what we are as human beings. For many, it is a foundation of how we define quality of life. The question here is: if we had reason to believe that the government was pervasively monitoring our communication, would it have the potential to adversely effect that communication and thus effect our quality of life?
To begin with, it's important to understand how digital wire-tapping is evolving. It is moving away from the traditional process where communication is targeted on an individual basis, to a more wholesale or data mining approach. In this approach, huge volumes of digital communication are aggregated, and sophisticated data processing techniques are used to "discover" patterns or connections. In turn, these discoveries can be used to either predict potential malicious activity or be used after the fact to corroborate other existing evidence.
In short, law enforcement (in particular at the federal level) are finding these types of aggregated approaches to be extremely effective, resulting in unprecedented investments by the FBI and Defense Department to collect and analyze data in this fashion.
The first lesson to be drawn from this trend is that going forward, the government will be very keen on blocking personal communication from being end-to-end encrypted and thus outside of this kind of general data collection. In fact, they are already pressuring major ISP's to somehow block this kind of communication (see for example this recent initiative from the FBI.) The question here is, do they have a legitimate position? Is there a legitimate argument to be made that the government should be able to collect this kind of personal communication for the purposes of national security and law enforcement?
The second important consideration is the track record government and law enforcement have in restricting interception activities to those specifically associated with an ongoing investigation or legitimate threat. That is, if we do hand over this kind of wholesale access to the government, do we have reason to trust that they will use this data for legitimate purposes only? This is a complicated question. For one initial perspective, see this overview regarding NSA activities along these lines from the EFF.
Finally, it is important to consider what might be called a "cooling effect". That is, if you knew or had reason to believe that the government was intercepting or monitoring your personal communication would it have an effect on the manner in which you communicate? Personal communication, or really, how we communicate with other people, is a foundation of who and what we are as human beings. For many, it is a foundation of how we define quality of life. The question here is: if we had reason to believe that the government was pervasively monitoring our communication, would it have the potential to adversely effect that communication and thus effect our quality of life?
