DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot • Hacker News Board

Re: DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot

#331

Post by vanniv » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 5:04 PM UTC

SkyBelow wrote: post #252

heartbeats wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freedom isn't free. I think people have just ought to realize that. People have this idea that free countries are more efficient, which is probably true in the long run, but it's a cop-out to just call it a day there. Once I was in Belarus. It's a heavily authoritarian country, make no mistake. When they had protests against their rigged elections, they traced the phones of everyone who went, then brought them in for…

Would Japan qualify as authoritarian? Yet it is safe to leave things out without watching them, except for umbrellas. There are even places in the US where it is safe enough. I doubt these places are more authoritarian but instead allow such social safety because of other reasons. Authoritarianism can, to some extent, replace those reasons if they are lost, but it replaces them with some sort of mutated social struct…

In most of the US, you can safely leave most things without watching them without much risk of theft.

I mean, if you leave something that's a strong temptation (like a big pile of cash) it'll eventually disappear.

Yeah, if you go in to one of the inner cities, your stuff will get stolen, but otherwise, generally nah.

Re: DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot

#332

Post by vanniv » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

dao- wrote: post #261

KorematsuFred wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This was in the capital of one of the poorest countries in Europe, but it was still one of the safest places I've ever been. Obviously if you put all people in jail they will be very safe there. But then you have less people working and producing more useful stuff than rotting in jail. The best example I give of this trade off between freedom and safety is that of women in saudi arabia. They have the least amount o…

> > This was in the capital of one of the poorest countries in Europe, but it was still one of the safest places I've ever been. > Obviously if you put all people in jail they will be very safe there. But then you have less people working and producing more useful stuff than rotting in jail. Friendly reminder that the US has the highest incarceration rate of all countries. > The best example I give of this trade off…

The US has the highest incarceration rate of countries from which you can trust the statistics.

That is a different thing.

Re: DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot

#333

Post by mindslight » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 5:16 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #307

mindslight wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment comes from a perspective of having been abused. While I respect your struggle, stressed analysis is not good when trying to foresee where the next source of abuse will come from. The commercial surveillance industry is not currently engaging in abuse on the scale the government has previously committed, but the government is not presently doing so either! Yet we are rightly concerned with setups that mak…

You realize that the government is trying to get the right to have backdoors to allow for surveillance. As far as what the government is presently doing. The “war on drugs” is presently more focused on minorities while drugs are treated as a “disease” in rural America. Presently, my son had four or five keys on his key ring that looked alike and he fumbled through them trying to get in our house. I made him a differe…

Yes, I do realize. I do not think this is a good thing. I think the government is currently doing plenty of terrible things. It has done bad things to me personally. The magnitude of those bad things would have been from three times to infinitely worse if I were Black.

You keep repeating these assertions as if we're not on the same page. We are on the same page here.

Where we diverge is that you're taking this indictment, and extrapolating it to an indictment of all government regulation.

I'm actually predisposed to this point of view as well, with regulatory capture and all, but the fact of the matter is that the synergy of government and corporate power is going to happen regardless of which rights we attempt to obtain for us individuals. And so we might as well try to reserve an ability to opt out of commercial surveillance as part of their bargain.

Commercial surveillance eventually feeds right into that same government which has abused you and your family, while being much more agile than blunt government programs. As far as I'm aware, there is no law which requires Experian, Lexisnexis, etc to pass their surveillance data to all levels of government, including the local cops that you're rightly worried about. They do so because it is profitable, and because power generally coalesces.

Re: DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot

#334

Post by mindslight » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 5:34 PM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #299

mindslight wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is you and law enforcement who are being binary. Plenty of laws are currently being enforced in the presence of strong encryption. The sky hasn't fallen. In fact, these high profile cases the FBI et al attempt to use as wedges generally involve someone who has already been caught with plenty of evidence, but the authoritarian impulse still demands more . As far as laws that can only be enforced/observed by reading…

If we're agreed that there is no deep principle is at stake and there are shades of grey, it seems that the difference between end-to-end encryption and link-level encryption (as cloud providers typically do) is a matter of practicality? Law enforcement agencies send legal requests to Google and Facebook all the time, and the sky hasn't fallen. Actually, for all X where X exists, the sky hasn't fallen :)

There is a deep principle at stake for sure - individual privacy in thoughts and communications.

Re: DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot

#335

Post by lostcolony » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 6:57 PM UTC

lastres0rt wrote: post #262

sabas123 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does being a CS major having to do with being pro-DRM? Isn't it mainly an economic/philosophical standpoint on copyright?

I believe it's something more to do with the OP's (mistaken) idea that CS majors are somehow more likely to be "hackers" or people who exchange pirated software or wares -- when really there's only a handful of people who know how to crack the DRM in the first place (which requires some degree of technical know-how) and then those people distribute the pirated goods to others (whose technical literacy may be far less…

Actually, it comes from the author's belief that CS majors should know that, A. DRM at best delays cracking, never prevents it, and B. That it ends up hurting the legitimate users, not the pirates, and C. That the more efficient it is at A, the more likely it will cause B. As even when I was in college, that was the case (I asked some of the students to give me an instance where a piece of desirable software was not available illegally within a week of release date. They were unable to provide one (in fairness, since then there have been a few cases of less desirable releases that went longer; nothing that had the attention of all the major cracking groups). I also asked if they were aware of some of the issues at the time (such as securom's huge issues, the installation of rootkits by some, the inability to use when moving computers, etc), they were not, despite having explicitly chosen the topic to do research on for the class. They went into the topic with the expectation that DRM is just a good thing, and even when researching it, only sought out sources that enforced that bias. Which shocked me, given they should be technically literate enough to know the issues, and the greater nuances involved.

Re: DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot

#336

Post by dropoutcoder » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 8:22 PM UTC

banads wrote: post #325

dropoutcoder wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two parties or three, how can three parties keep a secret versus two

The only way is to share keys

Currently but maybe there’s another way

Too much at stake

Balance of power

God bless America

I’m concerned

Programmer geniuses often can’t see the forest for the trees

This one issue will have a profound impact on our ability to work towards a more civil society

Hopeful that the geniuses will be willing to work towards a better compromise rather than simply resist on theoretical principles

Re: DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot

#337

Post by boring_twenties » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 8:41 PM UTC

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #328

boring_twenties wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> BUT IF ONE USES END-TO-END ENCRYPTION, ONE CAN'T ACCESS MESSAGES ON ANOTHER DEVICE, BY DEFINITION!!!!! You can encrypt each message separately for each device, that's still end-to-end encryption.

Yeah, and load it on a completely new device by providing only login and password, too?? (Like Telegram does)

Ah, no. I missed the part about it being a completely new device. This obviously only works for devices that were already authenticated when the message was first sent.

Re: DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot

#338

Post by Andrew_nenakhov » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 9:44 PM UTC

boring_twenties wrote: post #337

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and load it on a completely new device by providing only login and password, too?? (Like Telegram does)

Ah, no. I missed the part about it being a completely new device. This obviously only works for devices that were already authenticated when the message was first sent.

That's the point - Durov bashes WhatsApp for 'inconvenience' and supposed lack of privacy, but in reality this inconvenience is a result of real presence of privacy. In contrast, Telegram's convenience is a result of a real lack of privacy, because to work this way it has to have a way to decrypt user messages.

Of course, they tell tales on how deeply it is all encrypted on T's servers, and that only select few trusted engineers have keys, but those are just tall tales.

Re: DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot

#339

Post by SkyBelow » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 1:34 AM UTC

distances wrote: post #267

SkyBelow wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many times that are implemented so that IT isn't monitored, and the staff who is monitored can have selective enforcement. This allows for people to be fired for abusing their access when in reality they are being fire for some other action that isn't nearly as PR friendly to state.

> This allows for people to be fired for abusing their access when in reality they are being fire for some other action that isn't nearly as PR friendly to state. TBH sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory. And for what it's worth, at least in Finland getting caught snooping isn't cause for firing people, the convictions have been fines.

The idea that employers will fire you for justifiable reasons when the reality is that they are firing for unjustifiable reasons is far more than simple conspiracy theory. There are numerous cases of people winning discrimination lawsuits because such firings didn't cover up good enough and lawyers were able to prove the actual reasoning. I do not find it unreasonable to think that many more cases weren't caught because the individual either didn't have funds to fight back or tracks were covered well enough the jury wasn't convinced.

Re: DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot

#340

Post by distances » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 6:42 AM UTC

SkyBelow wrote: post #339

distances wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This allows for people to be fired for abusing their access when in reality they are being fire for some other action that isn't nearly as PR friendly to state. TBH sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory. And for what it's worth, at least in Finland getting caught snooping isn't cause for firing people, the convictions have been fines.

The idea that employers will fire you for justifiable reasons when the reality is that they are firing for unjustifiable reasons is far more than simple conspiracy theory. There are numerous cases of people winning discrimination lawsuits because such firings didn't cover up good enough and lawyers were able to prove the actual reasoning. I do not find it unreasonable to think that many more cases weren't caught beca…

Yes, I find it plausible. But you specifically said that this monitoring is often leading to baseless firing. Do you have proof there's a link, are there multiple cases where this was proven? If not, you don't have grounds for claiming that it's often happening in the context of data snooping. That would be just useless speculation of what could happen.