The fact that every "democratic" superpower seeks to criminalize or prohibit E2EE at the same time gives the impression there is some sorta coordination between state actors to do so.
UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption
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Re: UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption
#12Ending encryption is like ending math. It's not possible and just moves the developers more into the underground. It could likely cause regulatory arbitrage situations too (e.g. developers create apps for other countries but determined people in the U.K. find a way to access them).
I don’t like this argument because it makes the subject in question overly abstract in a way that would not apply in other situations.
Examples:
“How dare you make me become a licensed engineer just to be paid to do math?”
“How dare you arrest me for this child porn? It’s just a sequence of 1s and 0s, therefore, you are criminalizing a number!”
Re: UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption
#13The UK has threatened this on and off for a while. I recall around 2000 they proposed a bill which would have forced everyone who wanted to use encryption to escrow a key with the government. I used to watch some TV in those days and the UK programme "NewsNight" had a discussion about it. There proposing the idea was some poor government flunky. There explaining the flaws in the idea was Whitfield Diffie[1].
Diffie just started by explaining that cybersecurity is all about securing some asset from threats such that the cost of attack was too great given the value of the asset. How do you protect the store that has all the cryptographic keys in the entire United Kingdom? It would be essentially infinitely valuable as a cyberattack target. Government dude was totally out of his depth and the bill was eventually dropped.
[1] Turing award winner and the Diffie in Diffie-Hellman. Fair to say he's a guy who knows a thing or two about cryptography.
Re: UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption
#14The fact that every "democratic" superpower seeks to criminalize or prohibit E2EE at the same time gives the impression there is some sorta coordination between state actors to do so.
Everything is coordinated at some level. The DMCA began as an attempt to meet our “international obligations.”
Re: UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption
#15Re: UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption
#16The fact that every "democratic" superpower seeks to criminalize or prohibit E2EE at the same time gives the impression there is some sorta coordination between state actors to do so.
The intelligence agencies of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have collaborated extensively since WWII (this is the so called "Five Eyes"[1]) and of course the NATO powers coordinate defense as well as part of that organization.
Edit to add: I mention the five eyes because cryptography (and cybersecurity) tend to fall into the purview of the signals intelligence agencies in government, so that would be NSA in the US, GCHQ in the UK etc. They collaborate under this arrangement.
[1] https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/the-five-eyes-the-intelligen...
Re: UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption
#17The UK has threatened this on and off for a while. I recall around 2000 they proposed a bill which would have forced everyone who wanted to use encryption to escrow a key with the government. I used to watch some TV in those days and the UK programme "NewsNight" had a discussion about it. There proposing the idea was some poor government flunky. There explaining the flaws in the idea was Whitfield Diffie[1]. Diffie j…
Ironic considering we have things now like gmail, and god knows how many services
you could get access to via password resets if you could get access to all the emails. Or CI systems for another example
Re: UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption
#18The fact that every "democratic" superpower seeks to criminalize or prohibit E2EE at the same time gives the impression there is some sorta coordination between state actors to do so.
The fact that we regard as "democratic" (because they are good guys, or so we'd wish) a country with king and lords (even a House of Lords, or even "Lords Spiritual" [1]), is the greater joke.
[1] Just a random click https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_House_o... on the Bishop of Chichester https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishop_of_Chichester#List_of_b... reveals a list of bishops going back as far as 681, the year 681. Particularly funny is how the majority of the bishops seem to have "died in office". To call a land with 1,300+ years of hegemony "democratic" is beyond satire.
Re: UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption
#19Ending encryption is like ending math. It's not possible and just moves the developers more into the underground. It could likely cause regulatory arbitrage situations too (e.g. developers create apps for other countries but determined people in the U.K. find a way to access them).
I don’t like this argument because it makes the subject in question overly abstract in a way that would not apply in other situations. Examples: “How dare you make me become a licensed engineer just to be paid to do math?” “How dare you arrest me for this child porn? It’s just a sequence of 1s and 0s, therefore, you are criminalizing a number!”
Interesting times ahead. I would assume that child porn is illegal because it's production harms children. When we can synthesise it without child involvement, what are the reasons for banning it? It becomes on the same level as gore movies, kink adult porn or any fictional perversion book. It's up to consumer to choose to consume it or not. And at the end everything mentioned before can be turned to 1 and 0. So should we be more concerned more about how these 1 and 0 are produced (no one harmed, everything legal) rather than what is distributed using these 1 and 0.
Re: UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption
#20The UK has threatened this on and off for a while. I recall around 2000 they proposed a bill which would have forced everyone who wanted to use encryption to escrow a key with the government. I used to watch some TV in those days and the UK programme "NewsNight" had a discussion about it. There proposing the idea was some poor government flunky. There explaining the flaws in the idea was Whitfield Diffie[1]. Diffie j…
That was perhaps just the UK response to the Clipper Chip.