Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.? • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#341

Post by joycian » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 7:13 PM UTC

freeflight wrote: post #293

verizonuser wrote: post #242

Earlier 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…

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 sy…

How do people post such comments? Do you have these lists of source links just saved somewhere or do you just do it on the spot?

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#342

Post by clinta » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 7:13 PM UTC

OpieCunningham wrote: post #329

blackflame7000 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If congress and the president decide they want to increase the SC to 99 justices and add and additional 90 of their choosing then that's when the US Constitution officially dies but it can be done according to the law.

What’s the difference between 9 of their choosing and 99 of their choosing?

It's just a hyperbole for packing the court. Allowing one president to appoint >50% of the justices so that the court always rules in their favor instead of waiting for seats to be vacated and re-filled.

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#343

Post by andrerm » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 7:15 PM UTC

Is this treaty public? Where is it?

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#344

Post by grawprog » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 7:15 PM UTC

blobs wrote: post #332

GordonS wrote: post #220

The 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…

The keeping safe argument from government is indeed preposterous. As if that was their mission to keep us safe. Why are they allowing our nature to be destroyed in favor of money/economy? This years heatwaves killed many thousands of people in Europe only, some estimates are in the tens of thousands. This is real deaths in 1 year, not because of terrorist attacks, no fucking backdoor will stop this. And what are they…

>They are the only ones who can change things by law, not me.

I had this thought yesterday as I read about several prominent politicians in Canada, including the prime minister, actively participating in the climate 'protests' that occurred yesterday. Who were they out there protesting? Themselves? They're the ones with the power to change things. Why were they outside with signs instead of in their offices doing something about it?

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#345

Post by bakuninsbart » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 7:15 PM UTC

jhh wrote: post #234

GordonS wrote: post #220

The 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…

Still remember how one German Islamist terror group just used their web-email provider's draft feature. They never 'sent' anything. There are often quite simple ways to circumvent this kind of thing.

People can communicate by shooting holes into CS 1.6 walls. There are literally no borders for the imaginative mind.

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#346

Post by freeflight » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 7:17 PM UTC

joycian wrote: post #341

freeflight wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sy…

How do people post such comments? Do you have these lists of source links just saved somewhere or do you just do it on the spot?

It's just stuff that sticks in my mind as noteworthy over the years and decades of surfing the web, following those particular topics.

I mostly remember the headline, Google does the rest of leading me back to the article.

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#347

Post by taxidump » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 7:20 PM UTC

blobs wrote: post #332

GordonS wrote: post #220

The 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…

The keeping safe argument from government is indeed preposterous. As if that was their mission to keep us safe. Why are they allowing our nature to be destroyed in favor of money/economy? This years heatwaves killed many thousands of people in Europe only, some estimates are in the tens of thousands. This is real deaths in 1 year, not because of terrorist attacks, no fucking backdoor will stop this. And what are they…

I can not find any source that many thousands if not tens of thousands died in Europe in 2019 from the heat wave. Can you point me to your information source? I believe you are confusing the 2003 heatwave from over a decade ago with the one in 2019.

The 2019 heat was directly implicated in the deaths of at least 15 people. Five died in France, four in Germany, three in the United Kingdom, two in Spain, and one in Italy. Nine of these were drownings, attributed to people cooling down, and another involved an exhausted farm worker who went unconscious after diving into a pool. The three who died in hot air were aged 72, 80 and 93. Approximately 321 million people were otherwise affected by similar temperatures in the same countries.[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2019_European_heat_wave

Edited for clarity

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#348

Post by rsync » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 7:22 PM UTC

MarcScott wrote: post #255

Simon_says wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are they going to outlaw encryption libraries? Yes. Absolutely. That's the only logical endgame.

I've said this before, but you can't outlaw the maths. There's nothing stopping anyone from rolling their own encryption, using well documented algorithms. You'd need to literally outlaw Wikipedia. Hell, even one-time-pads could still be used by truly motivated bad actors that wanted to communicate securely.

"I've said this before, but you can't outlaw the maths."

I don't think this is the right analogy - instead, I think a better statement would be "you can't outlaw random numbers".

A random number and the ciphertext output of a secure encryption algorithm should be indistinguishable.

I don't think I am being naive to think that even in our wildest dystopian nightmares there is no real path from (current jurisprudence in five-eyes jurisdictions) to (random numbers being illegal).

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#349

Post by vidarh » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 7:23 PM UTC

Cpoll wrote: post #313

kick wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not personally have downmod capabilities, but I don't think it is necessarily too broad: If you interpret it as "People shouldn't read this", it seems reasonable.

I think equating "I disagree" with "people shouldn't read this" is problematic for a forum that wants to encourage discourse.

Revise that slightly to 'it is a waste if time to read this' maybe.

I downvote quite rarely in HN over disagreeing with someone. Usually it is when I don't feel the reply adds any value, and is actually negative for the discourse.

That is, e.g doesn't reach me anything about the opposing position, or is argumentative without any substance, but distracting from comments that are more constructive.

Of course other people use different judgement. At the same time, HN doesn't hide comments to a great extent. Even 'dead' comments are optionally visible (with the 'showdead' setting) and quite a few of us read HN with that on. It's very rare for downvotes to silence people here who aren't actively disruptive.

Couple that with first enabling downvotes when people hit a certain karma threshold, and various other limitations, and HN is free of a lot of the downvote problems of other places.

That to me makes it less of an issue if people downvote to signal disapproval here.

Often initial downvotes will be countered when people feel a comment has been downvotes too much as well.

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#350

Post by joycian » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 7:23 PM UTC

freeflight wrote: post #346

joycian wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do people post such comments? Do you have these lists of source links just saved somewhere or do you just do it on the spot?

It's just stuff that sticks in my mind as noteworthy over the years and decades of surfing the web, following those particular topics. I mostly remember the headline, Google does the rest of leading me back to the article.

It's impressive, thanks for taking the time.