Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption • Hacker News Board

Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

#151

Post by mytailorisrich » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 1:39 PM UTC

NateEag wrote: post #113

mulmen wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t because it isn’t a problem. It really is that simple. The cops can do their jobs in meatspace.

They used to be able to record phone calls with a warrant. They used to be able to read letters with a warrant, IIUC. With E2E encryption now widely available, no sane criminal will use any non-encrypted channel. So, a lot of methods law enforcement used to find very helpful effectively no longer exist. The steelman principle says that this is what you need to argue isn't a problem. Disclaimer: I lean towards the EFF…

> So, a lot of methods law enforcement used to find very helpful effectively no longer exist.

Exactly, this is a big practical problem and what these laws try to address (in a good or bad way...).

IMHO, this is a legitimate worry and opponents should indeed come up with practical alternative solutions. I think the EFF and others do not take a pragmatic approach but rather camp on ideological positions that will get them nowhere.

Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

#152

Post by dontcarethrow2 » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 1:45 PM UTC

Jon_Lowtek wrote: post #144

Back in late medieval europa most postal services had a back room, called cabinet noir where letters where carefully opened, read and resealed to check them for signs of treason against the crown or cross. These were often abused for what we today would call economic espionage. For these reasons many rich people employed private couriers who traveled to their business partners in person to hand over messages. Those w…

>A society that mistrusts its own citizens to a point where all those that whisper to each other are called criminals, dealers, traitors or terrorists is rotten at its core.

I mean you said it yourself, dealers. This is why I believe EARN IT will even be celebrated. Generations who accept a war on drugs as sane, did we ever think these people will produce offspring who can think for themselves? The ones who somehow did will now be outlawed as gray hat mathematicians in fear of prosecution because they know how to add a few numbers.

Let's ramp up those genetic studies and get rid of the undesirables already, ffs what's taking so long? We the public have a short memory.

Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

#153

Post by danaris » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 1:48 PM UTC

NateEag wrote: post #113

mulmen wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t because it isn’t a problem. It really is that simple. The cops can do their jobs in meatspace.

They used to be able to record phone calls with a warrant. They used to be able to read letters with a warrant, IIUC. With E2E encryption now widely available, no sane criminal will use any non-encrypted channel. So, a lot of methods law enforcement used to find very helpful effectively no longer exist. The steelman principle says that this is what you need to argue isn't a problem. Disclaimer: I lean towards the EFF…

Perhaps what we need to be doing is not finding new and creative ways for law enforcement to read people's correspondence, but finding new and creative ways to eliminate the underlying factors that cause people to turn to crime in the first place.

Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

#154

Post by fsflover » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 1:49 PM UTC

farias0 wrote: post #71

fsflover wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I strongly believe we have lost the war for privacy and security (against state level actors) already. Once the net adopted the platform model, we were screwed. This is very pessimistic. People still can understand the dangers (and are understanding) and switch to decentralized platforms, which by the way are actively being developed: https://joinmastodon.org .

Do you really see most people leaving the likes of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter? I don't think they care about privacy enough to stop doing what's easy and fun

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19322448

U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says (marketplace.org)

1293 points by rmason on Mar 6, 2019 | 616 comments

Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

#155

Post by srtjstjsj » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 1:50 PM UTC

choppaface wrote: post #16

Wrote Feinstein and got a reply (?!) that EARN-IT is “misunderstood” and that she won’t stop supporting it womp womp. Why does this bill have any bi-partisan support?? Would expect there would at least be some large special interests funding an opposition... big companies rely on encryption to keep secrets.

Many people have a delusion that just because they find that one major party is bad then the other one must be good. It's part of a common psychological phenomenon that has us overlook flaws in our allies/friends/family because we need them and can't survive alone.

Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

#156

Post by hardly_a_mirage » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 1:51 PM UTC

Jon_Lowtek wrote: post #144

Back in late medieval europa most postal services had a back room, called cabinet noir where letters where carefully opened, read and resealed to check them for signs of treason against the crown or cross. These were often abused for what we today would call economic espionage. For these reasons many rich people employed private couriers who traveled to their business partners in person to hand over messages. Those w…

> Today many argue the state has a need to access such correspondence to prevent crime, but such a need is like the need of an addict: nothing good can come from it and the people should not enable these institutions to satisfy an ever growing demand for insight into their private lives. One must remember that democracy is founded on the believe that thoughts and words are not crimes and everyone must be free to express them-self in public, but even more so in private correspondence. A society that mistrusts its own citizens to a point where all those that whisper to each other are called criminals, dealers, traitors or terrorists is rotten at its core.

I feel disregarding the usefulness of surveillance is part of the problem. We should not be arguing that that nothing good comes out of surveillance. It provides your opponent an easy strawman for a hollow victory. Because frankly, surveillance is a useful tool for law enforcement.

We need to rather argue that the moral cost and side-effects of public surveillance far outweighs its usefulness.

Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

#157

Post by SkyBelow » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 1:52 PM UTC

nojvek wrote: post #123

izzytcp wrote: post #104

All of you smart arses out here and there, we know it, we know. We know, VPNs and other stuff in between are not so secure and not private. Stop saying it, don't you have some other piece of knowledge to be proud of? for god's sake. Tor and Signal are better than Public Cloud, Chrome & SMS if you're looking for privacy. Don't you have common sense? - HTTPS is more secure and private than HTTP - Signal is more secure…

There are two parts. 1) Yes, you can build better encryption and privacy preserving technology. That is a technology and adoption problem. 2) There is so much you can do once the law says you can’t encrypt certain kinds of things and if you do, the state will be after you. That is a social problem. Our elected leaders aren’t serving us. Not mutually exclusive. We have to do both. Build better tech, educate others and…

3) People are willing to sacrifice freedoms to protect kids, likely a result of not understanding the complexities of such a nightmarish problem and how much freedom will have to be sacrificed and how little protection will be gained at great cost. Why? Because our society does not allow us to perform cost benefit analysis on a child's well being despite reality giving us no such relief as removing the need for such.

Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

#158

Post by xenophonf » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 1:56 PM UTC

dontcarethrow2 wrote: post #152

Jon_Lowtek wrote: post #144

Back in late medieval europa most postal services had a back room, called cabinet noir where letters where carefully opened, read and resealed to check them for signs of treason against the crown or cross. These were often abused for what we today would call economic espionage. For these reasons many rich people employed private couriers who traveled to their business partners in person to hand over messages. Those w…

>A society that mistrusts its own citizens to a point where all those that whisper to each other are called criminals, dealers, traitors or terrorists is rotten at its core. I mean you said it yourself, dealers. This is why I believe EARN IT will even be celebrated. Generations who accept a war on drugs as sane, did we ever think these people will produce offspring who can think for themselves? The ones who somehow d…

> Let's ramp up those genetic studies and get rid of the undesirables already

Holy shit, this is straight up racism. How the hell you got from protecting freethinkers to eugenics, I have no idea.

Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

#159

Post by ta76893547 » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 1:57 PM UTC

TapaJob wrote: post #98

The question is what is really secure? Running Telegram, over multiple VPN's? Accessing Gmail over multiple VPN's so Google doesnt get to know where you are 'really' logging on from? Making your own VPN network over a combination of AWS, G-Cloud, Azure, DO and Aliyun to 'hide' your actual location? Peoples thoughts?

It really depends on what you want or what your personal situation is. I'll give my thoughts on a few possible adversaries.

- 1. An individual attempting to perform an MITM attack on you. The classic free wifi adversary you've probably heard about. There's little risk of this individual using the sites you visit against you so you only care that they can't manipulate your usage of said sites: Use HTTPS and you'll be fine.

- 2. Your ISP. You don't want them to see where any of your traffic is going because you don't trust them: Use a VPN. Shift the trust to either a VPN provider or a cloud-hosting provider by running your own VPN.

- 3. Your Government. Let's assume they can see all of the traffic within the country and you don't want them to associate your traffic with you: This is the step where it becomes challenging, you want to blend in, not just add more security steps. Ideally you want your traffic to leave the governments jurisdiction and if needed reenter looking like normal traffic from other countries. Tor is a good option here, there's a reasonable amount of traffic on the Tor network to hide in and your traffic is almost guaranteed to leave your country at some point. Alternatively choose a VPN provider that resides legally outside of your country and choose a server that resides physically outside of your country. Both options will move your traffic outside of the jurisdiction of your government, so this should be sufficient within the confines of the current example.

- - What about a self-hosted vpn in a region outside my country? If you ever connect to a server inside your country the full path of your traffic will be able to be seen by your government.

- - What about multiple self-hosted VPNs outside my country? This is an improvement on the previous issue, but it's unlikely to prevent your traffic from being correlated to you on timing alone.

- 4. God's Eye. Your adversary can see all internet traffic everywhere on Earth: Good luck. Maybe use Tor over a popular VPN service to increase the difficulty of correlating your traffic to you? Hope the Nym mixnet becomes popular?

Some additional considerations:

- What if I don't trust a VPN provider? You probably want to hide your traffic in their traffic so pick a VPN provider that requires no user info to sign up and let's you pay with a cryptocurrency or cash. I know of Mullvad that fits this requirement, there are probably others as well. Self host a VPN and to the VPN service through your VPN, now neither the VPN service or the cloud provider has a full view of your traffic (wireguard makes multihop VPNs easy). You could do the same by use 2 vpn providers.

Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

#160

Post by nuker » Tue, Oct 06, 2020, 1:59 PM UTC

sdoering wrote: post #3

I strongly believe we have lost the war for privacy and security (against state level actors) already. Once the net adopted the platform model, we were screwed. Platforms are as easy to regulate, as for example the telephone companies were back in the days. They were easily forced to comply with wiretapping demands of the government. The moment a central platform controlled (most of) our communication and was able to…

> I strongly believe we have lost the war for privacy and security

You are mistaken counselor (c) The Descendants. These three easy things improve your privacy by 10x:

- Incognito / Private browsing by default. Clears cookies used by trackers and platforms. Staying logged in is bad. Login, do your thing and close the tab. No Chrome, it has its own Id.

- VPN. Hides your browsing history from ISP and your IP address from trackers and platforms. Smartphone too, and disable Location and Background app refresh for most apps.

- Adblocker (uBlock Origin / AdGuard for Safari, iOS too). Prevents trackers and malware from executing.