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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

#381

Post by rhacker »

cannabis_sam wrote: post #165
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…

>This is such a lazy argument I mean, I agree with you on the argument completely, but I disagree that it’s a lazy argument. It’s an extremely effective argument, relative to its factual content. The west is culturally conditioned to accept terrorism as justification and child abuse justifiably gets people riled up. What’s lazy is people who can’t be arsed to look at complex things from multiple angles.

Also isn't "This is such a lazy argument" like 100 times more lazy, because there's nothing backing up why it was lazy in the first place.

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

#382

Post by JaRail »

If they're worried about kids, maybe they should have asked to not enable E2E for Messenger Kids. There's already a feature to let parents see their kids' messages. I'm pretty sure they have no plans of breaking that. Government should be providing their expertise to help FB train AIs to help alert parents to suspicious chats. There are lots of good ways to protect kids. This ain't it.

Ask any woman/minority, domestic abuse victim, etc. They don't want people spying on their messages.

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

#383

Post by godelski »

crummy wrote: post #357
godelski wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 surveillan…

> Anyone remember the FBI and Apple case a few years back? How quickly the FBI hacked the phone after Apple wouldn't cave? To be fair, Apple is working to ensure FBI won't be able to do that next time.

I'm not saying anything bad about Apple here... I'm not sure what your comment is about. I'm actually saying (as an anti-Apple person) "good job Apple".

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

#384

Post by dclusin »

drawkbox wrote: post #376

It is amazing to me that people that are supposedly "pro-business" and "pro-market" are against encryption. Mostly encryption protects privacy and business information. Corporate espionage is bigger than state espionage or terrorism my many multiples, and directly threatens national security as well as markets. Encryption is pro-business and pro-privacy for business and individuals. Without encryption or with backdoo…

Perhaps because it prevents them from forcing a moral code on others? Like SOPA/PIPA protected the children and also penalized those immoral women who trade sex for money.

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

#385

Post by JamisonM »

tw04 wrote: post #345
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's a hard sell. Just picture a politician on live television having to choose between having this cute little child being raped for years before they commit suicide (letting the perpetrators off the hook), or ramp up the surveillance a bit. Picture them choosing the rape. But the argument doesn't even make sense. It makes the horrible assumption that pedophiles will continue using a service they know to be insecur…

  That's literally a provably false assumption. 
  The second they realize it's insecure (which 
  will take exactly one raid), they'll switch 
  to something else.
It is trivial to prove that the second a criminal realizes a given communication mechanism is insecure they do not stop using it if it is convenient.

Has every criminal in the world stopped using the phone after the first phone was ever tapped?

  And ALL of the above assumes that there
  are no criminal programmers and thus they
  have no ability to just write their own tools
But we know there are more than 0 non-programmer criminals who will not be writing their own tools.

You need better arguments than "if we can't stop all crime with an action it has no value" because it is a silly argument.

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

#386

Post by soraminazuki »

brunoTbear wrote: post #138
zzzcpan wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm not sure what the logical fallacy is you're referring to. I'm not advocating that we backdoor encryption. I'm asking what's the nuance in privacy vs crime prevention. I guess your position is one of an absolute, and therefore, to me, not especially interesting. I am curious what you think are the ways we can fight child abuse. It seems to me we have some obligation as technologists to see that our works aren't us…

> I'm not advocating that we backdoor encryption. I'm asking what's the nuance in privacy vs crime prevention. I guess your position is one of an absolute, and therefore, to me, not especially interesting.

What's your point? We can either give governments backdoor access, or we don't. It's disingenuous to suggest that there's some sort of "middle ground" and pretend to care about privacy.

> I am curious what you think are the ways we can fight child abuse. It seems to me we have some obligation as technologists to see that our works aren't used to harm the most vulnerable.

How about traditional targeted investigations requiring a warrant? I don't see any reason for technologists to enable mass surveillance.

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

#387

Post by echelon »

drawkbox wrote: post #376

It is amazing to me that people that are supposedly "pro-business" and "pro-market" are against encryption. Mostly encryption protects privacy and business information. Corporate espionage is bigger than state espionage or terrorism my many multiples, and directly threatens national security as well as markets. Encryption is pro-business and pro-privacy for business and individuals. Without encryption or with backdoo…

Terrorists can and will use steganography, which even the most advanced automated systems cannot detect.

They want to surveil the public.

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

#388

Post by daveFNbuck »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #254
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…

> 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's a hard sell. Just picture a politician on live television having to choose between having this cute little child being raped for years before they commit suicide (letting the perpetrators off the hook), or ramp up the surveillance a bit. Picture them choosing rape.

We see politicians regularly choosing to not enact overwhelmingly popular positions like universal background checks in the face of mass murders of children.

How many politicians have done anything to stop the Catholic church from hiding child rapists? This is a much more direct harm and no one who isn't a child rapist would lose anything if we fixed it.

Politicians are already choosing rape and murder when the stakes are much lower.

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

#389

Post by ohazi »

echelon wrote: post #387
drawkbox wrote: post #376

It is amazing to me that people that are supposedly "pro-business" and "pro-market" are against encryption. Mostly encryption protects privacy and business information. Corporate espionage is bigger than state espionage or terrorism my many multiples, and directly threatens national security as well as markets. Encryption is pro-business and pro-privacy for business and individuals. Without encryption or with backdoo…

Terrorists can and will use steganography, which even the most advanced automated systems cannot detect. They want to surveil the public.

They don't even need to... You can have a correct implementation of RSA in like 20 lines of code. The cat was out of the bag 20 years ago.

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

#390

Post by jancsika »

derefr wrote: post #361
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…

I feel like, to ensure privacy, we need an equivalent of Mutually Assured Destruction: the strategic introduction of a secondary Nash equilibrium that's so bad that it makes it obvious that we should choose the primary equilibrium. Right now, people have no clear sense on what "a gradual erosion of privacy at the hands of the government" really means . We haven't seen a 100% solid example of what any country would do…

In a way isn't this what web technologies did?

That is-- pick an insanely fast development cycle where piecemeal/baroque security approaches simply cannot keep up. Eventually you arrive at a place where the whole endeavor become a giant tinder box just waiting to go down in flames. But that forced browser vendors to say, "Ok, let's just assume everything is constantly on fire, cordon everything off into flame retardant boxes, and improve our response time by many orders of magnitude."

If anything ever gets too hot from the thousands of strangers I casually let in the front door I simply move to another building and recycle the burning one.

Meanwhile I treat my Debian install like a prized piece of Shaker furniture. You'd have to be a goddammned 19th century furniture historian with your credentials showing before I let you anywhere near my brittle little museum.

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