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UK surveillance bill includes powers to limit end-to-end encryption

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Re: UK surveillance bill includes powers to limit end-to-end encryption

#101

Post by toyg »

blowski wrote: post #83
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. It takes 10 minutes to find a hardware store shopping list and bomb recipe. Even then, a lot of ingredients can be purchased over time without raising any flags. Buy bleach at one store and ammonia at another, say you're cleaning if anybody asks, then find a public place to mix the two. Once someone decides to kill a lot of people, it's already too late. There is no, repeat, no way to prevent every mass murde…

It sounds like you're saying that because it can't be 100% effective, we shouldn't do it at all. You could say the same about having a lock for your front door, but I bet you've got one.

The lock on my door is basically a legal seal: the door itself is often so flimsy, you could probably kick it in, but because there is a lock, you can't then claim you entered by accident or that you assumed it was ok to enter. This is why effectiveness is relatively secondary.

This sort of surveillance, on the other hand, is supposed to be all about effectiveness... But it ain't.

Re: UK surveillance bill includes powers to limit end-to-end encryption

#102

Post by noarchy »

ythl wrote: post #43
sklivvz1971 wrote: post #6

It's such a pointless war on its own law-abiding citizens. It makes me sad. People that really care about privacy, people who need to hide what they do will not be majorly impacted. * The main threat is metadata anyways, not the data itself. Locating where you are (e.g. with millions of cameras and facial recognition) is a much worse threat. * They will still use full disk encryption, free software, PGP or AES, etc.…

> It's such a pointless war on its own law-abiding citizens. Governments will always wage war on law abiding citizens, taking away freedoms in exchange for securities until the citizens are secure but no longer free.

>Governments will always wage war on law abiding citizens, taking away freedoms in exchange for securities until the citizens are secure but no longer free.

And even then, such a notion of "security" might seem dubious to those who are conscious of having lost said freedoms.

Re: UK surveillance bill includes powers to limit end-to-end encryption

#103

Post by DashRattlesnake »

blowski wrote: post #93
nitrogen wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did you get that number? And "20% reduction" is meaningless without saying 20% of what. Like, 20% reduction of a 1/1000000 chance is not the same as a 20% reduction of a 1/3 chance. There are two common fallacies I see here. The first happens a lot with interpreting carcinogenicity or toxicity studies, where an X% increase/decrease is quoted without an absolute value. The second happens in the stereotypical sta…

It is a completely made up number. If your argument against increased surveillance is based on its ineffectiveness, then there has to be a level of effectiveness where you would agree that that it's acceptable.

> If your argument against increased surveillance is based on its ineffectiveness, then there has to be a level of effectiveness where you would agree that that it's acceptable.

Not necessarily. Someone could be try to persuade by offering an argument that he thinks will be appeal to some, but does not represent his full thinking on the subject (e.g. he could also have moral reasons for opposing increased surveillance).

Re: UK surveillance bill includes powers to limit end-to-end encryption

#104

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

blowski wrote: post #81
morsch wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe doesn't clearly have a security problem. A few insane people committing political violence doesn't change the fact that Europe is among the safest places on the planet.

At a data level, you are more likely to die or be injured in a politically-motivated attack today than you were 10 years ago. Attacks are now more frequent, more geographically dispersed, and more deadly - even if only on a very small percentage level. Even if it's not a problem today (in your opinion), then either that trend has to be reversed or it will become a problem at some point.

> Even if it's not a problem today (in your opinion), then either that trend has to be reversed or it will become a problem at some point.

Just because some number has increased, that doesn't say anything about whether it will increase further, and if so, at which rate. So: How do you know there is a trend in the first place?

Re: UK surveillance bill includes powers to limit end-to-end encryption

#105

Post by Blahah »

blowski wrote: post #53
tetrep wrote: post #24

I think this same logic that is purportedly the reasoning behind this bill would also require us to constantly record all of our vocal communications, as that would be the only way we could ensure that criminals could not have communications that aren't accessible to law enforcement. This, of course, would require microphones on all citizens as well as many more in the surrounding environment, to ensure communication…

I'm going to play Devil's Advocate here, because complaining about intrusions on our privacy and how ineffective they are, has become de rigeur on HN and Reddit without much dissent. There clearly is a security problem in Europe at the moment, and I'm assuming that the attacks are not being organised by the security services. So will this bill reduce, increase or have no effect on the attacks? If not, then what would…

I appreciate you're playing devil's advocate, so I'm holding back.

"There's a security problem in Europe at the moment". What are you talking about? The number of people harmed in terrorism-related events in Europe in any given year is dwarfed by the number of people who harm themselves by accident or stupidity in those same countries. And dwarfed to an even greater extent by the number of people killed by police in the USA, or killed in mass shootings that don't get attributed to terrorism in the USA. It is the media attention given to the situation, not the situation itself, that is terrifying. Europe is extremely safe and does not have a security problem.

The entire western world has a problem with xenophobia. It can't control its own politicians who lead military assaults on middle eastern or north african nations for purportedly moralistic reasons. Assaults that are guaranteed to alienate entire generations of people and incite preditable retaliatory violence.

Nothing about the proposed privacy intrusions helps protect people from 'terrorism'. It feeds a cycle of ineffectual security theatre and provocation of western-produced radical activism that makes us all less safe. With one hand we create and promote terrorism, and with the other we strip ourselves of our freedoms and march toward technological totalitarianism.

Re: UK surveillance bill includes powers to limit end-to-end encryption

#106

Post by regularfry »

tetrep wrote: post #24

I think this same logic that is purportedly the reasoning behind this bill would also require us to constantly record all of our vocal communications, as that would be the only way we could ensure that criminals could not have communications that aren't accessible to law enforcement. This, of course, would require microphones on all citizens as well as many more in the surrounding environment, to ensure communication…

    These sort of bills always make me wonder if we'll ever see a moral stance taken by tech companies.
obligatory: http://aaisp.co.uk/kb-broadband-realinternet.html. One of the reasons I'm a customer.

Re: UK surveillance bill includes powers to limit end-to-end encryption

#107

Post by toyg »

blowski wrote: post #81
morsch wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe doesn't clearly have a security problem. A few insane people committing political violence doesn't change the fact that Europe is among the safest places on the planet.

At a data level, you are more likely to die or be injured in a politically-motivated attack today than you were 10 years ago. Attacks are now more frequent, more geographically dispersed, and more deadly - even if only on a very small percentage level. Even if it's not a problem today (in your opinion), then either that trend has to be reversed or it will become a problem at some point.

You clearly didn't live in the '70s or early '80s Europe. I was born in '79 but the signs of political violence from those decades were all around me while growing up in Italy. That menace was somehow controllable through intelligence and surveillance, because it was mostly coherent; this wave is completely different. Intelligence will never catch bullied 18-year-olds and disenfranchised taxi-driver lunatics before they do something stupid. What you need is a stronger society where people are willing to talk to "differents" as much as to their own little tribes.

Re: UK surveillance bill includes powers to limit end-to-end encryption

#108

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

slg wrote: post #75
blowski wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to play Devil's Advocate here, because complaining about intrusions on our privacy and how ineffective they are, has become de rigeur on HN and Reddit without much dissent. There clearly is a security problem in Europe at the moment, and I'm assuming that the attacks are not being organised by the security services. So will this bill reduce, increase or have no effect on the attacks? If not, then what would…

Taking this logic a step further, what is the effect of this intrusion on privacy? Is it a philosophical problem or a real world problem? To borrow a tech phrase, are we talking about free as in speech or beer? I think that is the stage in the debate that convinces most normal people. Losing privacy of their gmail account to some faceless government entity is a theoretical problem that has no real impact on their liv…

> Terrorism on the other hand is a real world problem with easy to see consequences.

No, it's not. Just as the risks of loss of privacy are much higher than generally perceived, the risks of terrorism are much lower than generally perceived. Terrorism is perceived as a problem, but it really isn't, in most parts of Europe. Car crashes are a real world problem. Terrorism isn't.

(Now, I am obviously not saying that governments should simply blindly ignore terrorism risks--but overall, it really isn't a big problem, and there almost certainly are risks where most of the money would be better spent trying to reduce fatalities.)

Re: UK surveillance bill includes powers to limit end-to-end encryption

#109

Post by CWuestefeld »

blowski wrote: post #83
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. It takes 10 minutes to find a hardware store shopping list and bomb recipe. Even then, a lot of ingredients can be purchased over time without raising any flags. Buy bleach at one store and ammonia at another, say you're cleaning if anybody asks, then find a public place to mix the two. Once someone decides to kill a lot of people, it's already too late. There is no, repeat, no way to prevent every mass murde…

It sounds like you're saying that because it can't be 100% effective, we shouldn't do it at all. You could say the same about having a lock for your front door, but I bet you've got one.

No, I think you're taking it too far. We only need to conclude that the minimal benefits from the proposal (i.e., few attackes would actually be averted) are vastly outweighed by the extreme cost to our civil liberties.

There do exist more reasonable compromises. For example, we as a society have already said that you can search someone's property if you get a court order. That's a smaller cost, because the authorities are forced to go through a supervised process before anyone's privacy is in jeopardy, and it's still sufficient to find the evidence in a huge proportion of cases.

But the proposal on the table is extreme. It affects everyone's privacy, before there's even a notion that a crime has been considered.

Re: UK surveillance bill includes powers to limit end-to-end encryption

#110

Post by DashRattlesnake »

nitrogen wrote: post #84
hx87 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A white noise generator placed over the microphone, perhaps?

White noise can be filtered out if it's not louder than the source sound within the frequency bands of interest over the time interval that matters for interpreting speech. So make sure it's loud, and maybe contour the noise to match the frequency distribution of speech, and maybe make it unpredictably variable over time.

But wouldn't it only have to be loud at the microphone? So a quiet but very close white noise source (e.g. something taped directly over the microphone) could mask a louder but more distant source?
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