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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

#421

Post by justanotherjoe »

xenocyon wrote: post #155
eloff wrote: 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 d…

"Children have frequently been the victim of surveillance abuses"

What are you talking about? I'm seriously asking. This sounds like something people say without having anything real behind it.

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

#422

Post by weehobbes »

haditab wrote: post #331
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…

I wonder why they don't use this argument to advocate gun control.

"In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over." –Dan Hodges

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

#423

Post by yuushi »

ohazi wrote: post #389
echelon wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Correctness defined as "this produces the right answer" vs correctness defined as the above with the addition of "this does not leak information / is not highly vulnerable to side-channel attacks" are very different things, and only one of those definitions is actually useful for cryptography.

Writing it yourself for the first time, or just copying some code off the internet, is going to have a vanishingly small chance of being actually secure.

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

#426

Post by 8note »

cowmoo728 wrote: post #157
mr_overalls wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

more specifically, to keep black people from voting

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

#427

Post by sgustard »

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…

But we aren't "ensuring" privacy; we're inventing whole new forms of privacy. There has never been a private and secure channel to communicate with thousands of strangers across the world. Simply acting like this brand new thing is an obvious and unquestioned good is naive.

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

#428

Post by ultrarunner »

Johnny555 wrote: post #201
smueller1234 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite simply because this makes it hard for Facebook to fight back. If they do, they look like they're on the wrong side of morality. If the demand was phrased around security, it would be less emotionally laden (for most).

I'd be awfully surprised if anyone that really cares about this would be fooled by this ruse. For most people, if the government says "We need to do this so you'll be safe", the vast majority of people will agree, or at least won't actively object.

The argument is, as the saying goes, "good enough for government work."

I find that quite appalling, to be frank.

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

#429

Post by tempsolution »

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…

What number of things will happen?

This argument is so unbelievably stupid, that I don't even know where to begin.

First of all, encryption in WhatsApp is targeted towards consumers. You won't catch terrorists by limiting encryption. If terrorists and other criminals are not using encryption anyway, then they are so stupid that they deserve to be caught.

The only thing a lack of privacy does is throwing us further into dictatorship. Just imagine a madmen, like uhm... say Trump, with the full power of the secret service behind him and limited to privacy for end-users. Well this is just great. All the dirt he can dig up about his opponents. He asks foreign governments to dig up dirt, okay, that means right now the NSA isn't too much inclined to help this guy out, but what if they were?

If you water down privacy you are robbing the people of their only chance to organize protests and rise up to authoritarian governments.

Last but not least, the crimes prevented by not using encryption are absolutely negligible. The numbers are so freaking low that each day more people will die in car accidents in the US alone than would die globally because of pervasive usage of unbreakable encryption.

This analogy of `Uh a person could be prevented from getting raped is more important than preventing a fall into dictatorship` is so contrived that I don't even understand how anyone can eat this shit. Bad things happen all over the place and you are buying this sham argument that is preying on human psychology.

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