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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

#101

Post by wonderwonder »

pyronik19 wrote: post #60
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…

"president openly calling on foreign governments to investigate his political opponents." We're just going to completely ignore the last administration spying on their political opponents?

I don't recall that happening, although I do remember the Obama administration being concerned that the Trump campaign was being targeted by / cooperating with the Russians. Seems that looking into that is a legitimate use of government power but I guess that is going to depend on where you fall on your view on Trump.

But if it was true, seems to be another reason to allow End 2 End.

Unless this was essentially a "but her emails" post.

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

#103

Post by humble_engineer »

I am a proponent for encryption but I don't think Facebook should be allowed to end to end encrypt all of their messaging platforms. You will have people messaging very young children offering them $ to do things and law enforcement should be able to retrieve that with ease. If they do this, there would be almost no liability for spamming millions of young girls or boys recruitment messages.

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

#104

Post by mytailorisrich »

noego wrote: post #95
mytailorisrich wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

If someone could magically build a system that allows for the communication to be eavesdropped only by the allowed government agency, my objections would be dramatically reduced. But that's not the way tech works. Building one backdoor makes the entire system, and all users, vulnerable to a whole host of other malicious actors, including hostile foreign nations and unscrupulous hackers. We live in a world today where…

Backdoors are needed because a system uses E2E encryption.

If the system uses only P2P encryption then no backdoor is needed, which actually makes the system more secure to external threats. It is then for the provider to allow access to data only to "allowed government agencies" according to the law, which is how mobile phone networks work.

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

#105

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

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 mean, you could always do an audit and see what percent of a thing your automated system catches. That definitely doesn't seem inherently unknowable.

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

#106

Post by bitL »

ngngngng wrote: post #30
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…

> 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.

Image filtering is now trivial even using simple transfer learning, leading to >99% accuracy. It's just the training datasets might be super disgusting and question one's will to live when confronted with the savagery that is going on around the world.

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

#108

Post by vamega »

hannasanarion wrote: post #74
RoboTeddy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Where have they said they're doing this at all?

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

#109

Post by zzzcpan »

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…

> There has to be some nuance from the absolute privacy folks on this one. How do we balance the need to fight child abuse with privacy?

There isn't. This is a logical fallacy. Violating everyone's privacy is not the way to fight child abuse, not even one of the ways that can do anything to prevent it.

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

#110

Post by dheera »

hannasanarion wrote: post #74
RoboTeddy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Facebook can read the messages at both ends

This is why I believe that end-to-end encryption is not truly useful unless the source code of the clients is public, or the protocol is open.

Any closed source client can read messages at the ends, or be forced to do so by an evil government.

At the very least, they could open up XMPP compatibility again so that people could write their own open source clients for it. Australia wouldn't be able to do anything about the propagation of such open source software.

I was able to have end-to-end encryption running on top of MSN, AOL, ICQ, QQ, Facebook, Gtalk, Yahoo, and several others about 10 years ago with Pidgin and simple plugins that encrypted/decrypted messages on the fly. It's too bad they all moved selfishly to closed source walled-garden mobile apps -- it's a big step back in privacy.

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