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The EARN IT bill is back, seeking to scan our messages and photos

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Re: The EARN IT bill is back, seeking to scan our messages and photos

#421

Post by genocidicbunny »

Vogtinator wrote: post #208
genocidicbunny wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who uses that argument, ask them to hand you their phone, unlocked, and a list of passwords for all of their accounts. If you have nothing to hide, why would you have a problem with me poking around in the most intimate aspects of your life?

Not fully comparable because passwords usually give you more than just read access.

Well, you can pinky promise you won't do anything bad with that level of access. In fact, you can double pinky promise. That's like 100% more promise.

Re: The EARN IT bill is back, seeking to scan our messages and photos

#422

Post by tialaramex »

joebob42 wrote: post #376
tialaramex wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice your bank password is indeed a secret, and that's a bad thing, because that above definition is wrong, which is why I prefer to think about the U2 lyric (from "The Fly"): "They say a Secret is something you tell one other person, so I'm telling you, child". The bank knows your password. Which means they (or more precisely their agents, employees, etc.) can lose it yet they'll probably try to blame you. It…

Don't they usually store a hash of it? And doesn't it therefore for the most part work exactly the way you say it ideally should? Of course leaking the hash of my password might make it easier to crack, to some extent, but if they've done a good job then this is much better than it being something the bank can trivially lose.

> Don't they usually store a hash of it? And doesn't it therefore for the most part work exactly the way you say it ideally should?

Putting aside the banks who literally do store the password because they have security procedures like "Please enter the first and fifth characters of your password" even those that do store a password hash still need you to submit your password to authenticate.

So, like the lyric says, you tell the bank your password. You hope they just use it to authenticate you and immediately discard it, but if bank security lapses are anything to go by they're probably logging it "for security" and there are definitely employees able to snoop the decrypted plaintext passwords from customers on some internal teams.

That is what Augmented PAKEs fix, it's really hard to do well, and of course banks see themselves as infinitely trustworthy so why would they bother.

This mistaken sense of self-worth applies to your credit card PIN by the way also, of course banks and thus bank employees can know your PIN, which means when a purchase is "secured" by the PIN that rules out some local pickpocket having made the purchase, but as well as you it leaves open the possibility that it was a bank employee or their co-conspirator.

Re: The EARN IT bill is back, seeking to scan our messages and photos

#423

Post by clnq »

justinclift wrote: post #413
autoexec wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imho, sponsors of this bill want to collect dossiers and use them to blackmail opponents in the future. I wonder how it is that the NSA hasn't already enabled that. One of my early concerns with government spying is that we'd up with some kind of NeoMcCarthyism on crack where someone in power would be able to discredit any inconvenient person or even identify and eliminate the career of a potential opponent before…

> I wonder how it is that the NSA hasn't already enabled that. It seems pretty weird to assume it's not already done and in use by select people or groups in the NSA already. They literally have the ability, they're smart enough to pick their targets carefully, and there's plenty of evidence of their oversight being useless.

It only takes one chronic abuser of power, which a good percentage of people (I would estimate 5% - 25%) are.

Re: The EARN IT bill is back, seeking to scan our messages and photos

#424

Post by yakubin »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #416
yakubin wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s depressing that in modern times people in their 40s are considered young. In 1776 Alexander Hamilton was 21, Burr was 20, Thomas Jefferson was 33, Madison was 25, and Monroe was 18.

Why is that depressing? People live longer now. Though I guess it's depressing that people in their 20s and 30s can't afford kids now.

People live longer, but biological youth isn't shifted. People in their 20s are at the top of mental and physical performance. But our gerontocracies bar people of that age from any positions of significant influence. People also mature more slowly these days, due to infantilisation of culture and sheltered upbringing.

Re: The EARN IT bill is back, seeking to scan our messages and photos

#425

Post by xg15 »

GalenErso wrote: post #215
lysozyme wrote: post #182

I’m reminded by a speech by Frederick Douglass [1] that >This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these w…

[flagged]

We are Nihilists, Lebowski!

Nothin! Ve believe in nothin!

Re: The EARN IT bill is back, seeking to scan our messages and photos

#426

Post by autoexec »

justinclift wrote: post #413
autoexec wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imho, sponsors of this bill want to collect dossiers and use them to blackmail opponents in the future. I wonder how it is that the NSA hasn't already enabled that. One of my early concerns with government spying is that we'd up with some kind of NeoMcCarthyism on crack where someone in power would be able to discredit any inconvenient person or even identify and eliminate the career of a potential opponent before…

> I wonder how it is that the NSA hasn't already enabled that. It seems pretty weird to assume it's not already done and in use by select people or groups in the NSA already. They literally have the ability, they're smart enough to pick their targets carefully, and there's plenty of evidence of their oversight being useless.

You're right that it's possible. We haven't seen full on witch hunts, with people hauled before congress and cameras to have their dirtiest laundry aired while the world watches. We haven't seen presidents able to wield that power unrestrained either (despite the NSA being under the DoD and ostensibly answerable to the commander-in-chief). Still, it's possible that there's a much more quiet sort of manipulation going on behind the scenes from folks within the NSA itself.

Obama campaigned on the promise to end domestic surveillance, and while politicians lie all the time to get elected, listening to him speak back then I believed him. He was a strong orator and was saying what I wanted to hear which admittedly makes my judgement there a bit suspect, but he also had a long history of speaking out against things like the patriot act, the illegal wiretapping of Americans, and national security letters.

Once he got into office however, instead of reining in the NSA he greatly expanded the NSA's ability to spy on the American public and he started defending them in speeches. I've often wondered if he was shown something highly classified that convinced him that violating every American's rights was genuinely needed, or if he was just threatened into compliance by showing him what information they'd collected on him and his family.

Re: The EARN IT bill is back, seeking to scan our messages and photos

#427

Post by colinsane »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #365
colinsane wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

generally speaking, rulers don't care about your consent. they might care about the second and third order effects of consent, but to say they'll interpret silence as consent is to suggest that their knowledge of your consent is a primary driver of their actions -- and that's just not the case. but no, i'm not saying you should let yourself be steamrolled. anyone in this thread has the knowledge to work around this p…

I’m not familiar with Matrix. Does that include some mechanism which prevents “we know you’re running this server and politely ask you to stop”? I understand there are other tools for that but I wonder of the necessity with specific “stacks” as it were.

> Does that include some mechanism which prevents “we know you’re running this server and politely ask you to stop”?

to answer this literally: no. nothing out-of-the-box for that, at least.

but do sci-hub, zlib, and friends have such a mechanism? we've been here before with CFAA, then DMCA. ostensibly, we lost those legislative battles against DRM and copyright. and yet it's easier to access academic articles than ever before.

we have those things above because despite what legislators did, enough of the public is engaged with our goals, or views them as worthy, that it's political suicide to actually enforce on them.

so just do that again, but here: convince the public -- your peers -- that end-to-end encryption isn't for baddies; that privacy is a good thing. that your cause is morally just. build the tooling that makes privacy easy. then use it, share it, spread it. if we get that far, then congrats: whatever the legislators say can't actually hold water.

if you don't buy that, then do what worked for SOPA: voice your opinions publicly. keep the pressure on for months with website blackouts, banners and boycotts. make it a spectacle.

neither solution ends with "write your legislator". if you want to write them, i won't stop you: but that's not where the meat of any of this is actually determined.

Re: The EARN IT bill is back, seeking to scan our messages and photos

#429

Post by ambientenv »

BizarroLand wrote: post #317
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "why do you have the right to know?" is a decent answer. "What level of trust do you think you've earned?" "What do you want to do with all this information?" "How will this make things better?' "Don't you have more important things to spend time and money on?" "Is this really the best thing the government should be working on right now?" "How does this help any of society's ills?" "Will taxes need to be incr…

"IT PROTECTS THE CHILDREN!" they'll scream, while using it to take more power away from society and concentrate it into their own hands. Surveillance isn't some harmless thing, because you can tell a million lies with a drop of the truth in them for any reason you want. Imagine you get established in life and decide to run for local politics only to have the fact that you've gone to Vegas 4 times in your life somehow…

When you step back and look objectively and in an unbiased manner, you see that we (humans) are a species of dominance rather than collaborative partnership. It is a world where individuals must earn the privilege of survival, and by earn I don't mean only in a monetary sense but also a gatekeeper sense. Life is not of precious value; power and control are. This, and the commodification of labour, land, and money are bringing about the disintegration of capitalism with nothing on the horizon to replace it other than anarchy. Welcome to the interregnum.

Re: The EARN IT bill is back, seeking to scan our messages and photos

#430

Post by prox »

nullsense wrote: post #388
froggychairs wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve found that reminding folks who use the “you have nothing to hide" argument often quickly change their mind if you just remind them the political party they don’t like could use it against them This worked surprisingly well and without fail for the conservative side of my family. The instant I reminded them who was president at the time (Obama) all of them changed their mind I don’t love this strategy. It leans i…

Look at human history. We absolutely ought to fear power and those who wield it.

As I mentioned in a recent comment:

The balance between privacy and the authority is just that. We outsourced the rule of law to the state in order to have a fair and just society. Ipso facto the government should be fair and just to have the right to invade some amount of privacy in order to keep a society free, fair and just.

That’s why the judicial branch exist: to see if what the government (or anyone) did was playing by the rules. Which brings us back to politics being a danger to a society if people vote in unjust or unfair people.

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