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

The EU is set to declare war on encryption

tech.newstatesman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 167 posts

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#121

Post by kyboren »

noodlesoups wrote: post #38
mamon wrote: post #32

Do you have any good learning resources on encryption? any Github repositories worth mirroring, with the actual implementations? I am a programmer with zero experience in that area but want to some day be able to "roll out my own crypto" if necessary :) EDIT: I'm not afraid of all the math I need to learn, just point me in the right direction.

Cryptography is more math than programming unfortunately. It might take a lot of time to become apt at it, but it is a very commendable goal. The problem isn't necessarily in using a weaker encryption, it's that you can detect that you can't break some crypto, and arrest whoever is using that. This won't stop illegal use of course, but will stop anyone interested in their privacy

> This won't stop illegal use of course, but will stop anyone interested in their privacy

It won't stop much on the long term. Techniques like chaffing and winnowing[0] can be used to provide confidentiality while preserving plausible deniability.

[0]: https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/Riv98a.pdf

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#122

Post by skrebbel »

This is blogspam over this Financial Times article: https://www.ft.com/content/c5336824-140c-49ee-85a4-c8197f829...

My understanding is that this is merely a proposal. In any democracy, there's proposals all the time. This headline is needlessly provocative.

"The EU" does not have a singular opinion on stuff like this until proposals actually get turned into laws.

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#123

Post by lioeters »

ColanR wrote: post #57
hexbinencoded wrote: post #50

I can't wait for the "If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear" refrains to be trotted out yet again. Inverted totalitarian klepto-plutocracy wins against any individual who doesn't take extra-ordinary measures when it builds a panopticon. "Let's see your 30 year search history and find a crime in there to persecute, I mean, prosecute you with. Or even a professional technical illegality would suffi…

> I can't wait for the "If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear" refrains to be trotted out yet again. We should make stickers that say that, and paste them on the cameras and drones we use to videotape the police.

A while ago I learned the term "souveillance", or "citizen undersight", as a strategy for the public to "watch the watchers". The public must surveille and report on those who wield power over them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance

Apparently there's also a term "metaveillance", the "veillance of veillance".

Surveillance (oversight), Sousveillance (undersight), and Metaveillance (seeing sight itself) - http://wearcam.org/kineveillance.pdf

This paper is worth a look just for the cool images of the "Sequential Wave Imprinting Machine" that visualizes waves as a means of "sensing sensors".

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#124

Post by indymike »

dingaling wrote: post #117
indymike wrote: post #14

This is the same EU that came up with GDPR? Where is the right to privacy thinking on this? Encryption is essential to having freedom. It is simply the electronic equivalent to being able to meet in secret, a right that all humans can and should have.

Like GDPR you'll still have privacy on an individual level unless law enforcement decides that you shouldn't have. It's perfectly parallel.

Law enforcement does not have the right to be in my private meetings. Even with a warrant or if they spy, there are risks and limits. Yes, they can spy, but they are limited by reality. Encryption imposes almost the same limitations on digital life as secrecy does in real life. Why should my rights be different online?

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#125

Post by Kim_Bruning »

People don't seem to realize that you need both attack and defense.

Let's take the 4 horsemen: terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and money launderers.

* If you weaken encryption, you can catch more terrorists. At the same time, the terrorists can track down their targets more quickly, and they might even find your personal identity and counter-attack directly.

* If you weaken encryption, you can catch more pedophiles. But how will you be able to protect their victims? With weaker encryption/security, pedophiles will be able to track down information on potential/previous/future victims much more easily. And witness protection becomes worthless.

* With weakened encryption, one can crack a drug trafficking ring wide open. On the other hand, you will not be able to protect your witnesses. Worse, a smart organized crime cartel might be able to crack the encryption used by the police; using the thus-obtained counter-intelligence to evade capture. Witness protection programs become that much harder too, if not impossible.

* Money launderers will also be less safe if encryption is weakened. At the same time, everyone else's bank accounts will be less safe too, allowing for new kinds of fraud to proliferate.

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#126

Post by neilalexander »

megous wrote: post #73
orev wrote: post #24

Maybe they don’t realize that e-commerce wouldn’t exist without trustworthy encryption. They’re taking about sabotaging trillions of dollars of economic transactions in lieu of just doing real police work to find the criminals.

Not true. E-commerce did just fine even without TLS in the past. Also most of the e-commerce features don't really need encryption, but authenticity. That can be achieved with just asymmetric crypto and signing, but payloads can be in the open. Encryption is only needed for privacy.

> E-commerce did just fine even without TLS in the past

You know what else was easy in the past? Wiretapping, MITMing and network-level surveillance.

Moving back to sending credit card numbers and personally-identifiable information in plain-text would be the absolute death of e-commerce.

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#127

Post by fsflover »

ajb wrote: post #120
fsflover wrote: post #69

Please support Electronic Frontier Foundation if you want to help fighting this: https://eff.org .

Not sure the EFF is particularly active in the EU? I'd have suggested the Open Rights Group, except being UK based it's now harder for them to lobby the EU. Maybe La Quadrature du Net: https://www.laquadrature.net/en/

AFAIK, EFF is active in the EU: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/09/eff-eu-commission-arti....

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#129

Post by Proziam »

phtrivier wrote: post #93
Proziam wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real key here is knowingly . Large banks have had a slew of "scandals" whereby they've been caught moving many billions of dollars for evil organizations the rest of us would go to prison for donating to. How many times do these organizations have to get caught for it to be handled in a fashion comparable to mere mortals? I say "scandals" because by some miracle it never seems to be a particularly big deal in the…

It depends on what you mean by "big deal". The ICIJ published a series of damning articles in relatively-big-deal papers as late as yesterday. (1) Aguably, the news is shadowed by other, more immediate topics - it would be interesting to see how it would have been received in a non-2020-ish year. (I remember Panama Papers where a bigger deal, for example, probably because you could name famous people while in headlin…

> Aguably, the news is shadowed by other, more immediate topics - it would be interesting to see how it would have been received in a non-2020-ish year.

This is what frustrates me. You can find these scandals happening way before 2020. The fact that it isn't common knowledge is distressing.

[2016] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/29/deutsche-banks...

[2011] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico...

[2010] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-06-29/banks-fin...

[1980] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/06/07/1...

If the banks' involvement in such activities was promoted to the same extent as the political noise that currently dominates, we might have actually have made some improvement in human and drug trafficking between the 80s and now.

Re: The EU is set to declare war on encryption

#130

Post by ben_w »

ergl wrote: post #103
marcrosoft wrote: post #8

Let’s say they ban end to end encryption tomorrow in their save the children and puppies act. Guess who is still going to use it? The criminals are of course. You can’t ban math.

You don't need to ban math to ban e2e encryption in the same way you don't need to ban physics in order to ban murder. You pass a law making it a crime to develop or use e2e encryption algorithms, and punish those who don't follow the law extremely harshly. The rest will comply because they'll be scared to be punished.

A criminal org doesn’t need end-to-end encryption to be untouchable by the authorities, all it needs is an HTTPS web server with a login page. Those are cheap enough that any organisation with at least one full-time-equivalent person on their payroll can afford to change server every week.

The advantage of e2e is so a central chat server can’t be ordered to leak secrets; I can’t see how an org which doesn’t care about the law in general is going to care about that law in particular.

Post reply on HN