Slashdot Mirror
Europol Chief Warns About Computer Encryption
An anonymous reader writes The law enforcement lobbying campaign against encryption continues. Today it's Europol director Rob Wainwright, who is trying to make a case against encryption. "It's become perhaps the biggest problem for the police and the security service authorities in dealing with the threats from terrorism," he explained. "It's changed the very nature of counter-terrorist work from one that has been traditionally reliant on having good monitoring capability of communications to one that essentially doesn't provide that anymore." This is the same man who told the European Parliament that Europol is not going to investigate the alleged NSA hacking of the SWIFT (international bank transfer) system. The excuse he gave was not that Europol didn't know about it, because it did. Very much so. It was that there had been no formal complaint from any member state.
Europol not investigating is not strange. That is not their job. Cross border investigations are handled by the police in the memberstates, but with coordination from europol.
Whatever people believe, europol is not an european fbi. Although, it would probably improve things if they did become one...
Most government leaders are profoundly ignorant about technology.
For those of us who work with technology, it is difficult to understand how ignorant the leaders are, and what we could do to fix the problems ignorant leaders cause.
For most of its history, the Fourth Amendment has never been about protecting privacy, but rather protecting against using the state's power to disrupt innocent people's lives.
The SCOTUS decision of Katz v. United States counters that assertion, particularly in the realm of wiretapping.
Besides, how do you know that an ongoing unreasonable warrantless dragnet over the entire country isn't a disruption? It's insidious, even more so when the public wasn't aware of it.
To use the mandatory Slashdot car analogy, if a police officer asked you first, how often would you grant permission for him to pull you over, regardless of your speed?
To lawfully pull you over, the police officer must have probable cause to do so - to do otherwise is proscribed by the Fourth Amendment. It may be as trivial as a broken taillight, but probable cause nonetheless.
By conducting indiscriminate monitoring of the speed of vehicles, he's probing your vehicle's status, and that's invading your privacy.
With some exceptions (see United States v. Jones), you generally do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy on public roads.