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Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

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Re: Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

#41

Post by larkeith »

brunoTbear wrote: post #24

The claim of catching 99% of activity is really hard to justify. In many detection systems you cannot know your true number of false negatives. It's inherently unknowable in this case. A better metric would be mean time to detection for a given CEP sharer or perhaps a metric around how much CEP is shared before detection, or perhaps a metric for network size of CEP and how well FB can clean up an entire network at on…

I read that as 99% of activity that is caught on Facebook is caught by Facebook's systems, with law enforcement only catching 1%.

Re: Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

#43

Post by wheelerwj »

jacobush wrote: post #39
ngngngng wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> captures 99% of child exploitation and terrorism-related content Credit where it's due, good on them building such effective systems to catch this content.

But they just made that number up.

more or less agreed, would def like to see how they ended up at 99%

Re: Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

#44

Post by Johnny555 »

"We are writing to request that Facebook does not proceed with its plan to implement end-to-end encryption across its messaging services without ensuring that there is no reduction to user safety."

I don't understand why they don't just ask for what they want, why say it's about "user safety" when it's not about that at all.

Just say "As a matter of national security, the government needs to be able to read user messages (and we don't care if that opens up a hole that enables other governments to do it too)"

Re: Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

#45

Post by pilsetnieks »

saagarjha wrote: post #15
Brushfire wrote: post #11

If they don't do E2E, users will abandon Facebook for platforms that do support it (and already are). And they aren't doing this to commit crimes, but to prevent advertisements from targeting every conversation they've ever had.

I wonder how many WhatsApp users are aware that their messages are encrypted end-to-end.

It shows that in every message thread, so I'd say everyone; how many understand that and realize the consequences of having or not having E2E encryption is another matter.

Re: Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

#46

Post by [deleted] »

wonderwonder wrote: post #12

Sometimes I can understand the willingness to reduce the privacy of self and others in order to ensure that the law is able to prosecute those involved in heinous crimes. Our current political environment though involved a president openly calling on foreign governments to investigate his political opponents. What is to stop them from going after the private communications of those same opponents in the name of targe…

[deleted]

Re: Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

#47

Post by BonerBoi420 »

wonderwonder wrote: post #12

Sometimes I can understand the willingness to reduce the privacy of self and others in order to ensure that the law is able to prosecute those involved in heinous crimes. Our current political environment though involved a president openly calling on foreign governments to investigate his political opponents. What is to stop them from going after the private communications of those same opponents in the name of targe…

Does running for office exonerate you from investigation? Is it only okay if you get a phony FISA warrant first? The double standard is hilarious.

Re: Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

#48

Post by brunoTbear »

larkeith wrote: post #41
brunoTbear wrote: post #24

The claim of catching 99% of activity is really hard to justify. In many detection systems you cannot know your true number of false negatives. It's inherently unknowable in this case. A better metric would be mean time to detection for a given CEP sharer or perhaps a metric around how much CEP is shared before detection, or perhaps a metric for network size of CEP and how well FB can clean up an entire network at on…

I read that as 99% of activity that is caught on Facebook is caught by Facebook's systems, with law enforcement only catching 1%.

That's still not an especially resounding success, or an especially relevant metric for us to understand the efficacy of FB's detection systems, and doesn't help us understand whether encryption of content is going to hurt hunting CEP.

For example, they might be spotting a large fraction via network analysis, or other metadata approaches. Alternatively, they might just hash every image sent over messenger and match those to known CEP. Encryption screws up one avenue, but not the other.

Re: Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

#49

Post by jpadkins »

wonderwonder wrote: post #12

Sometimes I can understand the willingness to reduce the privacy of self and others in order to ensure that the law is able to prosecute those involved in heinous crimes. Our current political environment though involved a president openly calling on foreign governments to investigate his political opponents. What is to stop them from going after the private communications of those same opponents in the name of targe…

Forget the hypothetical. Our last administration used wiretapping on it's political opponent. Now that there is precedent that that is not illegal or 'dirty politics', what is to stop the current administration from doing it from it's political opponents?

Re: Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

#50

Post by jknz »

Detecting child abuse pictures is not incompatible with end-to-end encryption if the detection is done locally.

Facebook (or other messenger app owners) could train a good classification model to detect child abuse pictures on large servers and provide the model to smartphones locally. Before sending pictures, the app would run the trained model (which is cheap computationally). If if detects pictures of abuse with a certain accuracy, the app would block the transmission of the picture (possibly, explaining why to the user). If the detection of pictures of abuse happens again, the user could be banned from the app for 1 day, and if it happens more often the ban would become longer and longer.

That way facebook can fight child abuse without ever having the pictures.

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