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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

#301

Post by godelski »

kyboren wrote: post #217
IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not entirely sure how those four examples are supposedly invalidated by giving them a clever nickname. I'll take the privacy side in most any discussion of privacy-vs-security, but categorically denying the possibility that some crimes could be aided by encryption seems a step to far. It's also bad PR strategy: anybody not already on your side will be put off by your apparent lack of reasoning skills. Instead, ac…

Some crimes can also be aided by whispered in-person conversation. Should we require all in-person conversation to be shouted near a government office? The societal default used to be that substantially all conversations were inaccessible to the government except through testimony. Encryption does nothing to change the availability of information through testimony. Previously, remote conspirators could collaborate th…

I think your point is very important. Forbidding e2e encryption only enables mass surveillance. It does not affect traditional investigative work. There are other existing tools for the job.

Anyone remember the FBI and Apple case a few years back? How quickly the FBI hacked the phone after Apple wouldn't cave? Other tools exist to do targeted surveillance and targeted attacks. Only authoritarians want mass surveillance.

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

#302

Post by loup-vaillant »

filoleg wrote: post #285
loup-vaillant wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not entirely sure how those four examples are supposedly invalidated by giving them a clever nickname. They're not. A number of horrible things will happen as a result of pervasive end to end encryption. However. You have to run the numbers here. On the one hand, perhaps a bit more crime, some of which horrible. On the other hand, the privacy of everyone . It's a hard sell. Just picture a politician on live tel…

It is not that simple. Two potential unintended consequences of this no-encryption rule come to mind that might actually not just not help, but in fact make it worse for the victims. 1. They said that FB captures 99% of those illegal activities by themselves. What makes us think that government will be able to capture that last 1% on their own? 2. Encryption gets removed, potential perpetrators move to another platfo…

I agree, but many will not. So I figured we should address the central problem: increasing privacy automatically means increasing the ability for people to do whatever they want (that's the whole point). We'd be stupid not to anticipate bad consequences. It's just that the benefits are much greater, and we should be able to argue as much, even on TV in front of a potentially hostile journalist.

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

#303

Post by josh2600 »

autoexec wrote: post #237
colejohnson66 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On iOS, you can disable automatic app updates in the Settings.

Some apps (like Signal) force you to upgrade or they eventually stop working. It's a terrible practice.

Right, because the alternative of having a broken user experience for a monotonically increasing set of your users isn’t terrible.

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

#304

Post by bitL »

closeparen wrote: post #142
bitL wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is it not a crime to possess the training set?

AFAIK large companies have deals with the government and have special units that deal with that type of content (nobody survives longer than 12 months there).

You can get legal datasets for sick pr0n or warzone stuff you would like to keep off-platform that might have the same psychological effect on you.

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

#305

Post by munk-a »

Interesting side note, if the concern is that this end-to-end messaging is being made available through the same service that hosts social profiles - instead of asking the company to please-please-please include backdoors thank-you... maybe, just maybe, it's time to break up a vertically integrated monopoly - when your argument is that their vertical integration is literally a threat to public safety.

This will, of course, never happen because breaking up businesses and consumer protection is verboten and anti-american, but I really wish someone with a big voice could stand up and make this point because it makes them look silly.

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

#306

Post by munk-a »

danShumway wrote: post #182

> mere numbers cannot capture the significance of the harm to children. Oh, bull crap. By this argument, literally no protection or liberty that allows even one child to be harmed could ever be tolerated. Why stop at vetting baby-sitters or teachers? We ought to require mandatory background checks for every person who ever visits a family or goes into a public space that might contain children. Law enforcement also o…

If mere numbers cannot capture the harm to children then... why do we break out these equations when we're talking about fracking near school grounds.

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

#307

Post by munk-a »

russler23 wrote: post #227
ashelmire wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like when the Republicans said in the 90s that you don't solve problems by throwing money at them. But that's exactly how many problems are solved.

Which is why US healthcare is the standard of the world. Because it’s so profitable. /s

I mean, it has to be, the free market would correct it if it weren't, right? /s

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

#308

Post by justinclift »

anon9001 wrote: post #198
mlindner wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thought that people can remove all crime or get anywhere near it is faulty from first axioms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer." If you start thinking that parents "can be" the criminals then you've decided that parents are automatically guilty and must be proved innocent. This goes against the very moral fiber of the ent…

How is the idea that we can remove all crime faulty? Blackstone is just saying that we shouldn't try to remove all crime because it's more harmful to society to try than to let some crimes go unsolved. His main argument is that there might be an ambiguous situation where someone appears guilty but actually is not guilty. It's definitely possible to eliminate all crime with total surveillance with a high degree of acc…

> It's definitely possible to eliminate all crime with total surveillance with a high degree of accuracy.

How would you handle corrupt senior police officers covering the tracks for themselves, their fellow officers, and friends in high places?

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

#309

Post by salawat »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #240
salawat wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 illu…

If I say 15% of cars in San Francisco are Subarus, are you going to say that's impossible to know? Sure it may be true in my dataset, "but that doesn't mean it will generalize to all possible permutations of [traffic] ever." Well, no shit. But that's not the statement being made. If I wanted to know the accuracy of an important system. I'd do continual audits. Take a (stratified) sample of all things, get ground trut…

>If I say 15% of cars in San Francisco are Subarus, are you going to say that's impossible to know?

No, I'd ask you what your methodology was when you measured. For instance, going to the DMV and getting a list of all registered vehicles, and using that as a representative dataset to reason from is fine. (Depending on your definition of cars in San Francisco, and whether or not that is meant to include cars transiently moving through or not.)

Now if you told me you were using a Neural Network to recognize all Subaru models that drove by a particular camera, I'd start asking you questions, and want to see your training data, output, etc.

>Sure it may be true in my dataset, but that doesn't mean it will generalize to all possible permutations of traffic ever. Well, no shit. But that's not the statement being made.

That generally is the statement being made when people make claims about the accuracy of neural networks. Particularly the marketing people. You can only measure their accuracy within a constrained dataset, and overfitting is a thing.

>If I wanted to know the accuracy of an important system. I'd do continual audits. Take a (stratified) sample of all things, get ground truth labels for whether they should have been detected, and see what percent were in fact detected. Then I could estimate how much my systems did and didn't catch at any point in time.

Which, again means you're operating off things you know a priori to be the case. You don't know the full extent of everything to begin with, which phrasing in this article implies.

I'm not saying audits can't be useful; it'll get you a number, and sometimes that's all you need. You just need to be clear about what the numbers actually mean.

There's lies, damn lies, and statistics after all.

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

#310

Post by dualboot »

greyfade wrote: post #263
dheera wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I've been bouncing around the idea of a fully decentralized end-to-end encrypted chat protocol for exactly this reason, but I've been afraid to work on it for precisely the reason this thread is being discussed. I know that if my name were attached to the project, I'd be facing all kinds of unwelcome scrutiny from the government and news agencies. I'd lose the very privacy I want to maintain by designing privacy-prot…

Signal is pretty solid.

https://signal.org/

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