[cgoddard]

It's ridiculous to design a system for the purpose of spying on its users, with users being aware of that. The only people that will be discussing illegal activities using that medium then will be those so oblivious and dense that they likely would have been caught any number of other ways without the eavesdropping.

Savvy criminals will migrate to darknets and other methods of communication that are more robust against eavesdropping.

Personally i think authorities should just give up on the idea of eavesdropping. With proper encryption modern communications can perhaps be intercepted, but never deciphered.

Honeypotting seem like a much better strategy for catching internet criminals. Why would you ever shut down a child porn site or copyright infringement hub when you can instead take over and catch gather loads of evidence for prosecution?

[dailyrorschach]

A fine point to be sure, but again we already can see everything a user does on most websites - and most people don't even know about it.

Even with that knowledge though wiretapping still leads people to being caught. http://www.boston.com/metrodesk/2012/04/anthony-dinunzio-bro... So it's obviously still quite effective - and even with encryption they'll still devote man hours to trying to figure out ways around it.

[abalashov]

You are imagining sophisticated criminals from movies. Yes, genuinely sophisticated criminal rings with ample resources do exist, but they are in the tiny minority. I think you would be amazed at how low-tech, careless, and quite frankly, stupid most criminals are. This is the common denominator they are aiming at, as it offers the broadest and most dense prosecution yield.

[tomp]

> you would be amazed at how low-tech, careless, and quite frankly, stupid most criminals are

Then I'm sure there are other ways of catching them that don't threaten our privacy and freedom.