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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

#491
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True E2E Encryption would also mean the platform(FB, Telegram, Google, Apple, etc.) also can not read the messages and thus the law enforcement can not force them to reveal what a user said because it would be impossible for them to know.

Apple has true E2E encryption with iMessage if you don't turn on iCloud backup of your messages. It's encrypted when it leaves your device and decrypted on the receiving device. Furthermore the messages on your device are locked via passwords from the Secure Enclave.

> if you don't turn on iCloud backup of your messages

You and whoever you are messaging of course.

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

#492
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…

>But the argument doesn't even make sense. It makes the horrible assumption that pedophiles will continue using a service they know to be insecure. 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's not an assumption at all. The fact that people engaged in child pornohraphy have had decrypted communications use…

> The fact that people engaged in child pornohraphy have had decrypted communications used against them in court demonstrates this to be true

It only demonstrates that for some people, it's true. What about cases where they were using secure channels and thus haven't been caught/charged?

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

#493
post #91

> 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…

The Second Great CryptoWar: https://reason.com/2013/03/12/the-second-great-crypto-war/ > "The proponents of this process use fear tactics to win support, what the four cypherpunks dub "The Four Horsemen of the Info-pocalypse: child pornography, terrorism, money laundering, and the War on Some Drugs." In other words, laws passed to go after child pornographers, terrorists, money launderers, and drug dealers end up chi…

They did such a great job with Epstein too. Letting him go free for all those years and protecting him and then he suddenly dies when he is gonna name people in Government and the Royal family.

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

#494
How many crimes are solved through wiretapping or evidence gathered from Facebook servers? Facebook’s 99% figure needs more context — maybe that’s 99% of just 1% of all child abuse / sexual assault / terrorism crimes?

Some more statistics would be useful to quantify the impact on criminal justice of losing either of those options. Otherwise the arguments just feel political or emotional.

End-to-End won’t impact the major source of evidence in, say, sexual assaults where the victim unlocks their phone and submits a copy of their decrypted message threads to the police, though this is a controversial policing method, recently reported on in the UK:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/sep/21/people-repor...

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

#495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not substantiated, it's speculation. There's still a possibility it was an actual, non-coerced suicide.

For sane people, this is the only possibility.

For credulous you mean.

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

#496

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…

> Still, go say that on TV. I'm not even sure I'm safe writing it here.

The thing to point out is that we all make the implicit choice to let people die for convenience every single day: Almost all of us could choose to pay a bit more to charity to save a life, almost no matter how much we're currently giving or what we're currently doing, or could choose to take jobs that would do more to make the world a better place.

We just rarely have to face what choosing differently would have meant, so we get to pretend it doesn't have much to do with us. And granted, most of the time the consequences are many steps removed from our choices.

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

#497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me crazy but I'm thinking of buying one. The fact it has a camera cover and a microphone switch is enough to make me comfortable. I'm just waiting to find out if it's a software switch or hardware switch.

Should be pretty easy to install your own hardware switch.

The way electronics are put together today (lots of glue, e.g. the Surface Book) I'm not so sure about how easy that'd be.

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

#498

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…

Facebook relies on the fact that most Facebook messages are not end-to-end encrypted to detect illegal activity. Forget the last 1% – how would Facebook continue to detect the 99% without access to decrypted message contents?

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

#499
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…

Open source doesn't guarantee that the compiled source running on your device is the same as what you can view on, for example, GitHub. That is also a trust problem.

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

#500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can they know they capture 99% of such content given that WhatsApp is (if I understand correctly) encrypted fully end to end such that Facebook cannot access the messages passing through it?

Since WhatsApp is proprietary on both client and server side, it can't be proven that OpenWhisper wasn't tampered with. And chances are always against users when we speak of proprietary. It's disgraceful that Signal hailed WhatsApp's announcement to use it almost like a second coming of a religious figure.

I can imagine moxie now regrets working with whatsapp to implement the protocol there.
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