Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

buzzfeednews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 592 posts

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

#71

Post by rockinghigh »

tankenmate wrote: post #38
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…

Indeed the "anit-corruption" drive is widely considered President Xi's method to consolidate his power in China ("Flies and Tigers"). It's an only slightly more subtle version of double speak, accuse your opponents of exactly what it is that you are doing, so if it ever leaks you can point and say "see what he's doing too!".

Xi Jinping in China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-corruption_campaign_under...

bin Salman in Saudi Arabia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017–19_Saudi_Arabian_purge

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

#72

Post by beachy »

jpadkins wrote: post #53
jknz wrote: post #50

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…

don't trust the client. How easy it would be for a motivated community to create a binary patch that skipped the local abuse checks?

Why bother. Motivated community will just use their own encrypted tech to communicate.

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

#74

Post by hannasanarion »

RoboTeddy wrote: post #55
saagarjha wrote: post #5

> 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. Oh, so you’re asking for more end-to-end encryption? > While the letter acknowledges that Facebook, which owns Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram, captures 99% of child exploitation and terrorism-related content t…

How can they know they capture 99% of such content given that WhatsApp is (if I understand correctly) encrypted fully end to end such that Facebook cannot access the messages passing through it?

A third party observer cannot read the messages as they pass through the whatsapp network, but Facebook can read the messages at both ends.

Facebook has said that they don't do this outside of Australia, where it is required by law, but come on, are we really going to take Zuckerberg's word for it?

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

#75

Post by SamBam »

RoboTeddy wrote: post #55
saagarjha wrote: post #5

> 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. Oh, so you’re asking for more end-to-end encryption? > While the letter acknowledges that Facebook, which owns Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram, captures 99% of child exploitation and terrorism-related content t…

How can they know they capture 99% of such content given that WhatsApp is (if I understand correctly) encrypted fully end to end such that Facebook cannot access the messages passing through it?

Rephrase as "They are responsible for capturing 99% of the illegal content that is caught."

i.e., of the illegal stuff that goes through their system, some of it is captured, and the majority of that is caught by Facebook's own system.

Note, this article is recent and highly relevant: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-...

> And when tech companies cooperate fully, encryption and anonymization can create digital hiding places for perpetrators. Facebook announced in March plans to encrypt Messenger, which last year was responsible for nearly 12 million of the 18.4 million worldwide reports of child sexual abuse material

> Data obtained through a public records request suggests Facebook’s plans to encrypt Messenger in the coming years will lead to vast numbers of images of child abuse going undetected. The data shows that WhatsApp, the company’s encrypted messaging app, submits only a small fraction of the reports Messenger does.

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

#77

Post by inetknght »

Johnny555 wrote: post #44

"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 mess…

> 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.

Have you never heard someone lie through their teeth?

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

#78

Post by mytailorisrich »

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…

> Encrypt it, end to end, the government does not need to be able access all private communications of private citizens.

Law enforcement and security agencies need to be able to access any communication. This does not mean that they should monitor all communications.

They can eavesdrop on any phone call. They do not eavesdrop on all phone calls.

The problem with E2E encryption is that it prevents eavesdropping even with the standard legal safeguards (warrant, etc), while not being required for the privacy of users. It is only effectively a marketing tool to convince people to use services from providers they don't trust, although, of course, since they control the app they can still in principle access the data.

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

#79

Post by brunoTbear »

snarf21 wrote: post #33
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…

On top of that, so these crimes didn't exist before mobile phones? They just want to sit in the ivory tower and see everything. I'll also agree to this the day after Barr hands me his unlocked personal phone. I promise not to disclose anything I find.

You may be radically underestimating the degree to which the Internet has made it possible for people who abuse children to share content. In some cases, these crimes truly couldn't be perpetrated without the anonymity of the Internet, and the existence of these clustered communities of pedophiles encourages further abuse/exploitation.

I love the Internet, and my career is in security. But we as a security/privacy/technology community truly need to look hard in the mirror about how we are allowing and perpetuating lifetime harms to children and women.

Terrorism exceptions, like San Bernardino, don't ring with as much impact as the CEP argument.

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

#80

Post by vlan0 »

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.

>users will abandon Facebook for platforms that do support it

Assuming someone already has knowledge of Facebook's past activities, then they are likely already gone. If they are still using the service, it's unlikely this will make a difference.

Cheap and convenient is just too much of a draw for some folks. Especially when it involves "staying connected" with friends and family (irrational behavior driven by emotion).

Post reply on HN