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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

#151

Question for those more knowledgeable than I in this space: a huge value prop for iMessage is E2E encryption, correct? Why hasn't that gotten similar response from the AG? (OR has it already, and I may have missed it?)

> Question for those more knowledgeable than I in this space: a huge value prop for iMessage is E2E encryption, correct? Why hasn't that gotten similar response from the AG?

Because when Apple was preparing it, it wasn’t public about it, and the then-sitting AG wasn't looking to generate news articles with his name that weren't attached to his role in acts fueling an imminent Presidential impeachment, so no similar warning note.

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

#152
post #16

I hate these requests for government back doors into tech communication software in the name of "the children". Let the parents worry about and protect their own children. Let the government mind its own business and stay out of ours.

And if the parents are the abusers, then it's okay? I am still pro E2E encryption, especially given the Snowden revelations (the US gov cannot be trusted to be responsible), but it does come at a high cost. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-...

We could solve a lot of those problems if we put a camera, or quartered a soldier, in every home.

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

#154
post #147
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Note, this article is recent and highly relevant.. Talk about fear mongering, that article is horrible. It's the same old argument. "Child abuse is bad therefore you can't have any privacy", they position you as being against protecting children when your stance is actually pro security & privacy.

I think that reasonable people can hold both f̶a̶c̶t̶s̶ things in their heads at the same time 1. Privacy is important and good 2. It has almost certainly contributed to an explosion in the production and sharing of child pornography and abuse The question is what is the moral way to reconcile the two, not to deny that either exists.

Neither of those two things are facts. One is an opinion, and the other is speculation.

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

#155
post #16

I hate these requests for government back doors into tech communication software in the name of "the children". Let the parents worry about and protect their own children. Let the government mind its own business and stay out of ours.

As a parent, I reject this disingenuous pretense of concern for "the children". Folks are eager to invoke children to justify the surveillance state while conveniently forgetting the plight of children when it comes to concentration camps, poverty, and climate change. Secondly, children themselves have frequently been the victim of surveillance abuses and there is no reason to suspect that this instance will be any different.

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

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if the parents are the abusers, then it's okay? I am still pro E2E encryption, especially given the Snowden revelations (the US gov cannot be trusted to be responsible), but it does come at a high cost. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-...

We could solve a lot of those problems if we put a camera, or quartered a soldier, in every home.

Not often I get to invoke the 3rd Amendment. Get out of here, you Loyalist!

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

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the fourth horseman? edit: ok ok sorry I misread

1) child porn 2) terrorism 3) money laundering 3) war on [edit: some ] drugs

It was specifically "war on some drugs". Americans love drugs, and we even love dangerous or mind altering drugs. But some drugs, for various socioeconomic reasons, we have declared evil.

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

#158
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Au…

The only chance at security is if you can tap your network connection at the dumb wire layer, and verify that it's encrypted with your own private key.

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

#159

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.

You're not quite getting it.

You measure accuracy of detection via a training set of definitely known examples, and comparing it to the detections reported by your system.

You can say with certainty that their system catches 99% of your training data set, but that doesn't mean it Will generalize to "all permutations of child abuse ever".

That's two totally different things. In the end their use of that statistic illustrates an attempt to lie with statistics more than anything else.

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

#160
post #120
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anonymizatio…

> Note, this article is recent and highly relevant.. Talk about fear mongering, that article is horrible. It's the same old argument. "Child abuse is bad therefore you can't have any privacy", they position you as being against protecting children when your stance is actually pro security & privacy.

The article never makes the argument you're objecting to. It merely states that E2E is likely to allow certain crimes to avoid detection. That seems both plausible as well as empirically correct considering their whatsapp/messenger comparison.
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