FBI tells lawmakers it can't access Dayton gunman's phone • Hacker News Board

Re: FBI tells lawmakers it can't access Dayton gunman's phone

#151

Post by neilv » Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 1:13 PM UTC

mattrp wrote: post #145

neilv wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: FBI tells lawmakers it can't access Dayton gunman's phone

#152

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 1:25 PM UTC

neilv wrote: post #151

mattrp wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 outsi…

[deleted]

Re: FBI tells lawmakers it can't access Dayton gunman's phone

#153

Post by checktheorder » Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 1:26 PM UTC

SimeVidas wrote: post #20

Why is it important that the FBI can access that person’s phone?

>Why is it important that the FBI can access that person’s phone?

To establish legal precedent.

Re: FBI tells lawmakers it can't access Dayton gunman's phone

#154

Post by GordonS » Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 1:27 PM UTC

Fjolsvith wrote: post #46

Animats wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. They got the guy. There's not much question about him pulling the trigger. And he's dead. What's to find out?

Co-defendants or co-conspirators?

Is there any real reason to believe there were any?

Re: FBI tells lawmakers it can't access Dayton gunman's phone

#155

Post by tempguy9999 » Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 1:30 PM UTC

michaelmrose wrote: post #147

tempguy9999 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What evidence do we have that compelling evidence exists on this particular device. None. Now ask: what evidence do we have that compelling evidence DOES NOT exist on this particular device. None again! We can conclude nothing either way.

Don't you think they need to make a compelling argument that actual evidence exists and is being denied to them before we all install backdoors?

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?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20661590

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20661645

Re: FBI tells lawmakers it can't access Dayton gunman's phone

#156

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 1:35 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: FBI tells lawmakers it can't access Dayton gunman's phone

#157

Post by randallsquared » Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 1:36 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #52

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.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2016/01/05/462017461/guns-in-america-by-... [1] https://ips-dc.org/three-felonies-day/

Re: FBI tells lawmakers it can't access Dayton gunman's phone

#158

Post by vmh1928 » Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 1:38 PM UTC

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.

Re: FBI tells lawmakers it can't access Dayton gunman's phone

#159

Post by racnid » Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 1:48 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #118

JohnStrangeII wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: FBI tells lawmakers it can't access Dayton gunman's phone

#160

Post by JohnStrangeII » Sat, Aug 10, 2019, 1:49 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #133

JohnStrangeII wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 defin…

> 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). https://www.congress.gov/112/plaws/publ265/PLAW-112publ265.p... If not, please provide your citation so that I can read it and re…

Wikipedia has an extra page on that, which I took as the basis of my comment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shooting#Definitions

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.