Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption • Hacker News Board

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

#461

Post by krzepah » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 8:42 AM UTC

mindcrime wrote: post #407

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…

Still, go say that on TV. I'm not even sure I'm safe writing it here. FWIW, I applaud your willingness to make such a statement. (And no, this is not sarcasm!) Self-censorship is a horrible thing, and I feel like I die inside a little bit every time I catch myself doing it. But more and more these days it begins to feel like even hinting at a willingness to engage in "thought-crime" is exceedingly dangerous. I mean,…

Ok let's turn that the other way,

Do you say you want to apply a dictatorship state of global surveillance because criminals are going to use the internet? What about other tech available to them? Are we going to set up a surveillance mechanism in those as well? Scooters? Cars?

Who's going to compile all that data? How is it protected?

It's about the Governance of Information,

and guess what,

I want to be Governing my Data, not some shady politician that got elected for a 5 or 7-year term in some other country.

Every actor in those systems have access to the data of every person that got their info collected.

And yet we are still here with that pedophilia and terrorism argument that, while they are very true, have still evolved and expanded. Even with the Cloud Act and all of the shady agreements

It's an evolution of our sick society, we had that kind of criminality rampant in 2000, we saw that evolve with the net,

But just like the young gangsters that evolve with stolen scooters,

Criminality will always have its sick way.

But dictatorship and global surveillance?

We didn't accept that in the 2000.

And we should never accept that at any cost,

even if it falsely promises to resolve the problem of pedophilia, terrorism, and criminality on those spaces by applying weird unknown algorithms

Technology will always be used by criminals because these are part of the society we build and evolve. They will change their behavior just like all of us; We cannot give up on our freedom and ethics to help catch the few.

And that's what's the problem. I don't care about police retrieving the data of a criminal once a judge has agreed to that, I care when we give them the entire web information and allow them to dictate the behavior of those networks

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

#462

Post by elif » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 8:46 AM UTC

judge2020 wrote: post #371

elif wrote: post #360

Maybe what we need is an "encrypted messaging system" generator. If there is an infinite supply of encrypted channels, controlling them all becomes literally impossible.

I think you're describing PGP. Other than some platforms having character limits, you can run PGP over any text format as long as both clients (or humans) know what to do with the encrypted messages. A system that handled things like performing the encryption and decryption of messages over any platform would be interesting, the only pushback you would get from an authoritarian government is them telling providers to…

What I mean is not generating the encryption layer, but generating the transport layer.

For instance, discovering and negotiating various publically available http or irc or jabber etc. nodes, and coordinating around their unavailability.

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

#463

Post by nickik » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 8:47 AM UTC

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…

> It is amazing to me that people that are supposedly "pro-business" and "pro-market" are against encryption.

Republicans were never pro-market. Or at least not in the last 100 years.

Everybody that works for the state will not be a defender of freedom or liberty. They are servants of the American Empire, and the US is most certaintly an Empire.

The primary function of the state security is preservation of the state, and not security for its people.

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

#464

Post by cyphar » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 8:51 AM UTC

greyfade wrote: post #328

dualboot wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal is pretty solid. https://signal.org/

Maybe it is, but it's not the decentralized replacement for Discord and Teams that I envision.

I would take a look at Matrix[1], which is basically what you're describing (it's a federated replacement from group chats that has Signal-like E2EE and has an open protocol) and it's already implemented.

[1]: https://matrix.org/

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

#465

Post by nickik » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 8:51 AM UTC

Miner49er wrote: post #58

snarf21 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are partially right but the issue is that E2E isn't even enough. E2E doesn't matter if they force a patched binary that also sends the data to the government. This is EXACTLY what the Australian laws saws they must do, oh and it is a gag order so they can't disclose it. I'm starting to wonder if this is a smokescreen. Eventually give in to E2E because you know you have got app store signing keys for the apps so y…

This is a good point. E2E is better then not, but you still can't trust FB. Anybody who seriously cares about privacy will still use something open source.

But its not about those couple people, its about rolling out better security to billions of people. Even a 0.01% increase in secuirty is an incredible benefit if it runs on a platform like Facebook.

It also totally changes how government has to force Facebook into giving them something. They can't just request access to some server anymore.

The main way to defeat a state is to make mass survailance difficult enough that it doesn't scale well.

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

#466

Post by nickik » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 8:53 AM UTC

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…

That's some of the most blue eyed innocent comment I have ever read. Go read about the Soviet Union.

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

#467

Post by ownagefool » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 8:55 AM UTC

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…

This whole privacy thing is pretty mute if the lack of privacy doesn't come with its own danger. The wider princple is likely based around a simpler question.

Who is more of more danger to you. A cabal of rich drug dealing terroist pedophiles or your own Government? The argument then becomes one of statistics and then of the lesser harm.

I imagine the answer is obvious with the Government being sigificantly more harmful. You're likely comparing a few hundred deaths of tens of thousands.

You'll always find a subset of the population who thinks the death of citizens or harm is justified in some way, because they took some action that broke the law.

But find enough examples where the offernder did no direct harm to anyone else and I suspect you'll give most reasonble people pause for concern.

And if the facts don't match your gut, then maybe you're wrong and privacy isn't all that important.

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

#468

Post by krzepah » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 8:59 AM UTC

JamisonM wrote: post #385

tw04 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

They don't need to write up the tools, just to use them, they are widely available

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

#469

Post by dieFledermaus » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 9:15 AM UTC

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…

>"...mere numbers cannot capture the significance of the harm to children..."

Good to see that the "think of the children" argument[0] is still in use today. /s

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children

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

#470

Post by quonn » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 9:31 AM UTC

kazagistar wrote: post #367

Kalium wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm asking what's the nuance in privacy vs crime prevention. If someone has an idea that can help prevent abuses and protect privacy without enabling abusive governments, I'm all ears. Unfortunately, to date all we've seen are proposals like the Clipper chip which amount to a backdoor to everything. Understandably, experts are somewhat skeptical of replaying the experience. > I am curious what you think are the way…

The ability for the citizenry to oversee and monitor the government should be required to be higher then the ability for government to oversee and monitor the citizenry. Do away with the veil of secrecy over government entirely (no NSA, no CIA, so secret ongoing investigation, no privacy for meetings among politicians, etc); that would slow abuse to the point where maybe we could trust the government to keep an eye o…

Meetings need to be private, otherwise everyone will self-censor all the time and no meaningful discussions are possible anymore. Like, thinking through the opposite point of view for example. Quotes will be taken out of context and published by the media.