The law-enforcement framing
- Privacy is personal good. It’s about your desire to control personal information about you.
- Security, on the other hand, is a collective good. It’s about living in a safe and secure world.
- Privacy and security are inherently in conflict. As you strengthen one, you weaken the other. We need to find the right balance.
- Modern communications technology has destroyed the former balance. It’s been a boon to privacy, and a blow to security. Encryption is especially threatening. Our laws just haven’t kept up.
- Because of this, bad guys may win. They are terrorists, murderers, child pornographers, drug trackers, and money launderers. The technology that we good guys use— the bad guys use it too, to escape detection.
- At this point, we run the risk of Going Dark. Warrants will be issued, but, due to encryption, they’ll be meaningless. We’re becoming a country of unopenable closets. Default encryption may make a good marketing pitch, but it’s reckless design. It will lead us to a very dark place.
via The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work:
The framing of mass surveillance determines what one thinks it is about. And mass surveillance has been brilliantly framed by power so as to slant discourse in a particular and predictable direction. Let me describe what I’ll call the law-enforcement framing, as regularly communicated by people like (U.S.) FBI Director James Comey.
This is the law-enforcement framing.
Rogaway’s own criticism:
The narrative is inconsistent with the history of intelligence gathering, and with the NSA’s own mission statement. Yet the narrative’s uneasy coexistence with reality hasn’t mattered. It is, in fact, beautifully crafted to frame matters in a way guaranteed to lead discourse to where power wants it to go. It is a brilliant discourse of fear: fear of crime; fear of losing our parents’ protection; even fear of the dark. The narrative’s well-honed deceptiveness is itself a form of tradecraft.