Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An even worse anti-encryption bill than EARN IT

cyberlaw.stanford.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 367 posts

Re: An even worse anti-encryption bill than EARN IT

#31

Post by jeffparsons »

Computer criminals (especially the commercial variety) and foreign intelligence agents must be drooling right about now. If something like this becomes law, it's only a matter of time until a mass-breach gives, e.g., China or Russia the dirty laundry of thousands of politicians and business leaders in one fell swoop. I don't think I need to spell out what that would mean for what's left of democracy in the USA.

I'm curious to know if anyone has any insight from the inside: do the particular congresscritters drafting these bills genuinely not understand the damage that would be done if this sort of drivel passed into law, or do they just not care?

Re: An even worse anti-encryption bill than EARN IT

#32

Post by gentleman11 »

mamon wrote: post #25
gentleman11 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The further we get from wwii, and the Cold War to some extent, the harder it is to remind the public how scary it is to live without freedoms. How do we remind them? Could China and Russia act as cautionary tales that voters would respond to? Putin jailing and murdering his political opposition, Chinese concentration camps for muslims - why do so many people assume it can’t happen here? Nazi germany wasnt some backwa…

> Germans didn’t like what happened - there were countless assassination attempts against hitler, but it was just eventually too late. That myth has to die - there was no real opposition against Hitler for as long as he was successful. He was probably the most popular political leader of all the time. German people did not have a problem with his hatred against Jews, on the contrary, that's what gave him his populari…

I’ll read more about it before I post the idea again, thanks for the correction

Re: An even worse anti-encryption bill than EARN IT

#33

Post by mtgx »

pensatoio wrote: post #17

These bills terrify me. A lot of stuff happens in politics that’s frustrating, and much of it doesn’t catch my attention. There’s something about the pure ignorance that goes into breaking encryption that I can’t comprehend. I can understand when bills come through and the extreme differences in opinion are the result of different interpretations of facts and truth, but when it comes to encryption, there is no safe p…

It may be ignorance for most of the politicians that support the bill, but it's not ignorance for those creating and co-sponsoring the bill, but pure maliciousness. They want to give the government the power to read every single thing you say online, any consequences (or constitutionality) be damned.

Feinstein, Burr, and others like them haven't been champions of mass surveillance powers extensions for the past 20 years out of "ignorance". They know exactly what they're doing.

I still remember a video from the Senate floor showing how ruthlessly and in bad faith Feinstein argued FOR FISA 702 extension back in 2012 using lazy fearmongering about terrorists - the same kind of bad faith fearmongering used to allow the Iraq war, etc.

It boggles my mind that Feinstein has remained a senator for so long in California, but I suspect it may have something to do with the electronic voting machines there. I mean, you could say she has more than enough friends that could help her out with that, especially if she continues doing what she's been doing in the Senate.

Re: An even worse anti-encryption bill than EARN IT

#34

Post by incompatible »

a012 wrote: post #30
incompatible wrote: post #15

Would this be for "online services" only, or would operating system vendors have to decrypt users' encrypted file systems on demand? Answer: according to the article "any device that has more than a gigabyte of storage and sells more than a million units a year could have to build a government-required backdoor if it is subject to five warrants or other requests, as would any operating system or communication system…

I briefly read the doc and it requires assistance to decrypt local device storage and remote storage. So it's a full spectrum demand for decrypting data.

Going after systems that have over a million users would leave a pretty big loophole for niche vendors and open source. But with such a big precedent, those could easily be targeted later.

Re: An even worse anti-encryption bill than EARN IT

#35

Post by grey-area »

mjburgess wrote: post #28
mcv wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascism did control quite a number of countries some 80 years ago. I think it's not unreasonable to say that full fascism was their endgame.

Fascism was a political situation in 1930s italy. I think the commentor is objecting to this new, rhetorical use of the term which essentially connects any "nostalgic, authoriatrian" impulse to a 1930s-style tyranny. The left's use of "fascism" today is much like the rights use of "socialism/communism".

Just like the symbol of fasces was only used in ancient Rome and has no other meaning? Or the swastika, used in India as a symbol meaning wellbeing?

Do you genuinely think symbolism and the meaning of words isn't plastic and contingent on context?

Re: An even worse anti-encryption bill than EARN IT

#36

Post by AnthonyMouse »

anon9001 wrote: post #14
gentleman11 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The further we get from wwii, and the Cold War to some extent, the harder it is to remind the public how scary it is to live without freedoms. How do we remind them? Could China and Russia act as cautionary tales that voters would respond to? Putin jailing and murdering his political opposition, Chinese concentration camps for muslims - why do so many people assume it can’t happen here? Nazi germany wasnt some backwa…

> why do so many people assume it can’t happen here? Is that actually the assumption? I'm pretty sure everyone already assumes that the government already has all of your messages, browsing history, transactions, etc, and they can come for you if they want. Between the massive surveillance state that already exists and the judicial miracle of "parallel construction", it's already very much a problem. The only thing l…

There is something worse than gulags.

Telescreens, watched by "AI".

They can arrest you on trumped up charges, but it's not really feasible to do that to everybody, and extreme heavy-handedness promotes resistance.

Once they reach inside your device, they don't have to murder or imprison you, they can just give you a little slap whenever you try to stray from the garden path. Let you know that they're watching so they don't even have to censor you, and can claim that they don't, because you censor yourself.

Crimethink. Doubleplus ungood.

Re: An even worse anti-encryption bill than EARN IT

#37

Post by Cthulhu_ »

fulafel wrote: post #20

What are the effects of this, if passed, on the rest of the world using Office 365, Facebook or AWS? It might be impossible to reconcile with some regulation in eg the EU.

I hope (fingers crossed) that the encryption laws will simply not apply to the EU. I mean most US companies operate via an intermediate company hosted in e.g. Ireland or the Netherlands already, so I reckon legally they can disregard these bills.

Of course, if the US government starts to offer money for data, they may budge anyways. I'm fairly sure MOST data can freely be shared with the US, it's just government data and higher level company data that isn't allowed to cross the borders.

Re: An even worse anti-encryption bill than EARN IT

#38

Post by rakoo »

gentleman11 wrote: post #8
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #2

This bill will be sold to the right as helping fight against foreign terrorists living in the US. It will be sold to the left as helping against the alt-right organizing and spreading hate. And it will be sold to everyone as helping stop child exploitation. In addition, there is already a lot going on in the country to keep the average person from focusing on this issue. It seems like allowing the government to spy o…

The further we get from wwii, and the Cold War to some extent, the harder it is to remind the public how scary it is to live without freedoms. How do we remind them? Could China and Russia act as cautionary tales that voters would respond to? Putin jailing and murdering his political opposition, Chinese concentration camps for muslims - why do so many people assume it can’t happen here? Nazi germany wasnt some backwa…

Even you have forgotten that it's already happening in the US: you only need to look at the horrendous human conditions and the industrialization of the prison and justice system, which targets minorities for the pettiest offenses to be able to fill the prisons and make profits for their owners. Or look at the concentration camps at the border, where migrants are treated worse than we would treat any animal. Or look at the disproportionate treatment of minorities by police force: they are _scared_ of the police force, to the point the advice is to not trust the police. Is that something a citizen from a free country should face ?

It _is_ happening already, and despite the few vocal people talking about it the news cycle is spinning so fast that it goes out of the discussion in a matter of days and people seem to forget it.

Re: An even worse anti-encryption bill than EARN IT

#39

Post by Johnnynator »

incompatible wrote: post #34
a012 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I briefly read the doc and it requires assistance to decrypt local device storage and remote storage. So it's a full spectrum demand for decrypting data.

Going after systems that have over a million users would leave a pretty big loophole for niche vendors and open source. But with such a big precedent, those could easily be targeted later.

> Going after systems that have over a million users would leave a pretty big loophole for niche vendors and open source. But with such a big precedent, those could easily be targeted later.

Smaller just don't have to do it proactive, but can be required to do it later.

> the Attorney General can simply command it to build one, using what’s called an “assistance capability directive.” (If it does already have that capability, the AG can use the directive to command it to maintain it.) That isn’t limited to the million-plus club; any provider can be served with such a directive. That is, the “big” providers have to proactively design for decryptability, and the “little guys” with less than a million U.S. users better gird their loins

Re: An even worse anti-encryption bill than EARN IT

#40

Post by AnthonyMouse »

mamon wrote: post #25
gentleman11 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The further we get from wwii, and the Cold War to some extent, the harder it is to remind the public how scary it is to live without freedoms. How do we remind them? Could China and Russia act as cautionary tales that voters would respond to? Putin jailing and murdering his political opposition, Chinese concentration camps for muslims - why do so many people assume it can’t happen here? Nazi germany wasnt some backwa…

> Germans didn’t like what happened - there were countless assassination attempts against hitler, but it was just eventually too late. That myth has to die - there was no real opposition against Hitler for as long as he was successful. He was probably the most popular political leader of all the time. German people did not have a problem with his hatred against Jews, on the contrary, that's what gave him his populari…

> He was probably the most popular political leader of all the time.

Worth noting that their first major win was in response to the stock market crash, but his popularity really only soared after they took power and imposed censorship.

Free speech not such a virtue in Nazi Germany. Much easier to be popular when nobody is allowed to say anything against you.

Post reply on HN