I imagine they spent a lot of time solving crimes, asking questions like:

"Where did they keep all their papers and correspondence?"

"Can somebody come break into this safe we have a warrant for?"

What did the cops do before X was invented?

They didn't worry about X being used to commit or cover up criminal activities while continuing to try to do their job of keeping communities either safe or oppressed, depending on how well they related to them.

I support strong crypto, but I think implying detectives and the DoJ are just too lazy or dumb or whatever to deal with this problem is a little unfair.

Apologies if that wasn't the implication

Except in most circumstances, there wouldn't have been any papers, because nobody was recording all their conversations. Nowadays, everything is happening digitally and is stored indefinitely by default; and law enforcement feels like they deserve access to all that.

The attempts at preventing ubiquitous encryption don't seem to be focused on crimes where there would have been a paper trail if people still used paper; they are focusing on reconstructing the last year or so of someone who is either dead or uncooperative, all in hopes of finding something they can use.

If they were targeting organizations with a bureaucracy for some crime, I think they could just demand access to all documents and get them? If I remember correctly, in the Levandowski case Google's lawyers got access to a huge trove of Uber's internal emails. If a private company can get that access, it should be possible for law enforcement as well, no?

Right? Apparently police never solved crime before they were allowed full access to every aspect of your life.

To be fair, it used to be that they didn't really solve most crimes.

there has never been a point where they solved most crimes. The difference is now people just happen to be carrying more information with them in their pocket than they ever had before.

To be fair, they still don't

They do just like they do now: lobby to get more laws to either (1) gain more leverage to coerce compliance or (2) criminalize actions which are tangent to the behavior they want to coerce.

I realize your question was rhetorical.

In my nation, and as I hear in many other places, the police force was much more decentralized in the past. You had local police handling problems at the local level using local knowledge. As I hear/read it was a bit more costly, had the occasional problem of local corruption, quality had a bit more variance, organized crime was a bigger problem, but the average crime had better results and was done quicker. There was also no mass surveillance.

That's also because criminals needed local knowledge. If I wanted to commit a crime today in another city, I can get there easily and quickly and get all the info I need online. In the past, small cities would've noticed strangers but (luckily) you can walk through other cities nowadays without people objecting that. For the police that means that they need to follow criminals and be able to share information nationally and internationally.

I'm no supporter of insecure cryptography, but before there was internet or phones and access to such, lots of crimes went unsolved.

Clearance rates for homicide have _dropped_ over the past 50 years:

  America’s homicide clearance rate—the percentage of solved
  crimes that lead to arrest—has fallen considerably in the
  past 50 years, from around 90% in 1965 to around 64% in
  2012, according to federal statistics.

(https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21656725-police...) (See, also, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/06/police-arent-getting-...)

IMO, similar to counter-terrorism efforts (most spectacularly, 9/11), technology becomes a crutch. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if mass encryption leads to _improved_ clearance rates, as law enforcement becomes less complacent. Take this latest example: the FBI agent declines Apple's help because he's convinced the geeks at the FBI lab can handle it. He presumably doesn't bother actually confirming with the geeks in the lab, nor does he attempt to put Apple in touch with the lab. Just utter complacency, confident that the machine (computers, bureaucracy) will suffice.

This sort of laziness wouldn't have been tolerated in Hoover's FBI. Moreover, Hoover likely would have been more aggressive using the tools available to him--keyloggers, etc--rather than whining.

Given that we're now learning that many of the convictions won last century were based on bad evidence and corrupt behavior, I don't really put much stock into those figures.

Wouldn't that be a change in data collection more than in absolute quality of problem-solving? Japan, for example, I remember reading that their near-perfect homicide rate is actually because they'll classify it as "fell down some stairs" if they can't solve it. Particularly in the US with its history of social issues, I can easily see a ton of homicides in the 50s just never being written down.

I lost the link, but another newspaper article said that the clearance rate for homicides of whites dropped from, IIRC, 90% to 85%. So, yes, part of it is social issues. But in any event, it's an interesting fact that official clearance rates have moved in the opposite direction of advances in technology and ease of remote surveillance. Technology doesn't solve our social issues, and in fact can exacerbate them.

Regarding Japan, yes, their official rates are questionable. I wish I could find the journal article, but last year I was researching the supposed 100% clearance rate in Singapore and came across a very in-depth article[1] that discussed clearance rates in Singapore, Japan, and elsewhere in Asia and that left me with the impression that w'ever the actual clearance rates, they're nonetheless _much_ better than the U.S.

[1] Spoiler: the 100% clearance rate in Singapore was plausible, in no small part because it's a small city-state with very few homicides to begin with.

Or homicides that were attributed to some person that it was convenient to lock away and who were unable to prove their innocence.

A good example of this is sexual assault cases on campus. A lot of times they try to handle them without getting the real police involved, or attempt to downplay everything about it to keep the statistics pointed one way.

They would open letters, tap phones and watch bank accounts. All of those things can be subverted now. That said, they were just lucky back then... it doesn't mean everyone should suddenly give up their right to privacy now.