The title is inaccurate. This does not require a backdoor. The agreement changes nothing about the use of encryption.
https://twitter.com/mmasnick/status/1177979730932297728?s=21
Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?
291–300 of 591 posts
Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disagree on hypocrisy. US still affords significant freedoms and largely respects human rights. Whether your communications can be decrypted or intercepted on networks that are government regulated anyway is not hypocritical. Residents of the US are still free to use whatever mathematical algorithm they want to encrypt their comms. Transporting OTP's across physical borders is trivial, and not technically illegally i…
> Disagree on hypocrisy. US still affords significant freedoms and largely respects human rights. If you are US citizen maybe, for the rest of the world. Definitively not. Without being a lawyer, I'm pretty sure random drone strike on civilians in Pakistan, torture in Guantanamo or intercepting entire world communication is not an example of "respect of humans rights".
> Without being a lawyer, I'm pretty sure random drone strike on civilian in Pakistan, torture in Guantanamo or intercepting entire world communication is an example of "respect of humans rights"
This is a good point, I think. The US has an appalling record on human rights (aside from your examples, arming terrorists and overthrowing democratically elected governments spring to mind) - as long as we're talking about the rights of non-Americans.
Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?
#293The idea that moves like this will "keep us safe" is utterly preposterous; there are a multitude of other ways in which terrorists (or the boogeyman de jour ) could communicate - are the UK and US governments going to insist on backdooring IRC, Slack and face-to-face conversations? Are they going to outlaw encryption libraries? I truely fear for the future that western governments, in particular the 5 eyes members, a…
Disagree on hypocrisy. US still affords significant freedoms and largely respects human rights. Whether your communications can be decrypted or intercepted on networks that are government regulated anyway is not hypocritical. Residents of the US are still free to use whatever mathematical algorithm they want to encrypt their comms. Transporting OTP's across physical borders is trivial, and not technically illegally i…
The US, by their own admission, is "killing people based on metadata" [0].
Which in practice is done by using machine learning [1] on huge data sets gathered with that global surveillance enabled trough Five Eyes.
Because the army of humans that could manually sort trough those zettabytes of data has yet to be cloned. All that ends up in the fancy-sounding "disposition matrix" [2] aka the USGs kill-list. It's just systems upon systems doing their thing and nobody is directly responsible or accountable for anything that ends up happening, like when yet another 30 Afghani farmers get "splatted" by accident [3].
Considering how this has been going on for close to two decades, and the US has a very convenient way going about the casualty statistics [4], I guess these Afghani farmers are just another rounding error in the "war on terror". Figures, because before that they were mostly considered biometric cattle [5] and lab-rats for fantasies about "full-spectrum surveillance" [6].
Note: Under Trump, the USG now even stopped releasing their shined up drone statistics. So it's pretty much impossible to know the full scale about what's still going on to this day.
[0] https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-base...
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/the-n...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/19/us-drone-strik...
[4] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/under-o...
[5] https://www.wired.com/2010/09/afghan-biometric-dragnet-could...
[6] https://we-make-money-not-art.com/big-eye-kabul-surveillance...
Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?
#294This is essentially a worrying prospect if these developments are actually implemented or advance further. The users trust in the social media service is breached if a backdoor where to be placed in their products (It also defeats the purpose of the end-to-end encryption argument). If you reside in the UK and especially in London, things have just become 500% more Orwellian. >Priti Patel, the U.K.’s home secretary, h…
It is also worth pointing out that you can still buy paper bush tickets, and can use cash to do so.
Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?
#295I agree it would be good for police to be able to look into a criminal’s phone, but how will they actually achieve this without wrecking the encryption for everyone?
Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?
#296IMHO editorializing this as a ‘back door’ is inflammatory.
Users need to learn to not have any expectation of privacy when using social networks. It extends far beyond PII leaks.
Perhaps complaints should be directed at the root of corruption/abuse of such systems, at least as much as the capability itself. The capability is inherent to the technology just as tapping a phone line is.
Telcos have to provide interception capabilities (CALEA in the US) or they are not allowed to operate. This has been true for decades, most people do not know how that works but they do know it is possible. As these social media communications services become more entangled in our lives perhaps they too could be deemed essential infrastructure and treated as utilities.
Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?
#297Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?
#298Here is what is most frightening. So let's say this law passes BUT someone builds a really good open-source messenger. You can't install it now because you can't side-load apps on devices. You alpha geeks can but the other consumers can't. What we need is a law requiring some type of side loading. It needs to be possible to go to a website, and install an app there directly and have it support all of the native platf…
> So let's say this law passes BUT someone builds a really good open-source messenger.
> What we need is a law requiring some type of side loading.
You are asking the bad guys (passing bad laws) to be good (passing good laws). I do not think those expectations are realistic.
Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?
#299Meanwhile, the US government (mostly Trump) is banning Huawei equipment over spying concerns. Apparently the only concern is that we weren't the ones doing the spying.
This really hurts our credibility on a government level outside the Five Eyes.
Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?
#300IMHO editorializing this as a ‘back door’ is inflammatory. Users need to learn to not have any expectation of privacy when using social networks. It extends far beyond PII leaks. Perhaps complaints should be directed at the root of corruption/abuse of such systems, at least as much as the capability itself. The capability is inherent to the technology just as tapping a phone line is. Telcos have to provide intercepti…
I agree. The proposed law is a bit confusing. The UK already has forced key disclose under RIPA.