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UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption

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Re: UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption

#101

Post by toyg »

LightBug1 wrote: post #22
derelicta wrote: post #11

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.

Mate, we've not been a democratic superpower for more than a decade now. Just a rudderless, inward looking joke floating adrift off the west coast of France.

The UK has not been any kind of superpower for almost a century now. The last decade is just the last gasp, like a disabled 90-year-old refusing to accept that he can't live alone.

Re: UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption

#102

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

afavour wrote: post #56
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m sorry but this is a very simplistic take. The King has no meaningful power at all, MPs have power over the Lords and they are democratically elected. I’m not for a second saying the system is wonderful and beyond reproach. But suggesting it’s equivalent to an autocracy or something is just flat out wrong. If you want to complain about the U.K. political system complain about first past the post or the creeping an…

It was just a quick quip how we regard as "democratic" a country (?) called "United Kingdom", language is funny like that.

Sure, UK is a great place to live for many of their citizens, and a great country overall, culture and so forth. It's not for nothing we are speaking their language and not Esperanto or something. But it's not a democracy, and that is fine.

If you ask me (I know you didn't, but just in case), not even the Nordic countries or Switzerland pass the main test of democracy: not being able to vote for everything, but being able to vote "No" to anything and everything. That should probably be the hallmark of a democracy. Even the toga-wearing Greeks did not have democracy to such an extent.

In an ideal world, every ballot would have as a first option the option "No". I said in some other HN comment [1], a second point would be to tie the duration of the mandate to the voter turnout, if 30% vote, then the mandate is not 100%, but 30% also of the 4/5 years mandate.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35300083

Re: UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption

#103

Post by jeroenhd »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #88

To ban end-to-end encryption you effectively need to ban math. Even if all messaging apps will remove built-in encryption function you can still use e2ee in your keyboard app or something that would seamlessly decrypt incoming messages and encrypt outgoing messages on the fly.

Key escrow and other three-way encryption algorithms exist. You wouldn't want to use them in any normal circumstances, but there's no technical reason why you couldn't. A key for you, your recipient, and your friendly government agent.

Very few people actually write cryptographic code, and even fewer write code that is safe to use. I doubt many people will bother with some kind of messenger hook/overlay keyboard to supplant the native messenger encryption. After all, in some countries SMS/MMS is still in use and nobody seems to care about encryption there.

Re: UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption

#104

Post by Veen »

traceroute66 wrote: post #40
seanhunter wrote: post #13

The 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…

> 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 Aah, the good old days when the BBC was un-biased. These days you would get a government flunky, and on the other side of the table a pro-government flunky from a lobbying outfit whose real accreditation has been carefully omitted by the BBC and th…

It's worth pointing out that right-wingers say precisely the opposite and can produce plenty of evidence showing the BBC's left-wing bias.

Re: UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption

#105

Post by thomastjeffery »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #12
xyzzy4747 wrote: post #8

Ending 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!”

Mathematics is not "any arbitrary sequence of numbers".

Mathematics is the study of fundamental patterns that are present between them. Mathematics is the abstraction itself.

Banning encryption is like government banning video compression because it could be used for criminal activity.

It's not the data itself being banned, it's the abstract math it is made from.

Re: UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption

#106

Post by traceroute66 »

Karellen wrote: post #82
traceroute66 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Aah, the good old days when the BBC was un-biased. These days you would get a government flunky, and on the other side of the table a pro-government flunky from a lobbying outfit whose real accreditation has been carefully omitted by the BBC and th…

> Aah, the good old days when the BBC was un-biased. I'm curious, around when do you think that changed? And was there a specific story they reported on (or didn't report on) that really solidified the change for you?

> I'm curious, around when do you think that changed?

The smell of change appeared more clearly in the run-up to Brexit. Certainly post-Brexit I would say it is very much evident.

> And was there a specific story they reported on (or didn't report on) that really solidified the change for you?

To be clear (as per my Radio 4 example cited above), it is not necessarily a case of "reported on / did not report on", it is frequently more a case of bias / lack of impartiality, again as nicely exemplified by my "two hardcore Brexiteers fight over Brexit" example[1].

However, I could also give you many examples of "reported on/did not report on". Perhaps one of the most well known is Lady Mone of House of Lords fame. She is/was subject to various investigations regarding supply of PPE during CoVID.

For a long time, Lady Mone's investigations were widely reported in all mainstream media (tabloids, broadsheets, other mainstream TV/Radio news ... you name the place, it was reported there).

But the BBC ? Nope. No mention on TV/Radio news, and for a long time a search for "Mone" on the BBC News website yielded exactly zero results.

Even today although you can now find a small number of mentions on the BBC website, you'll have to go looking on other mainstream sources for the actual detail.[2]

[1] https://www.thenational.scot/news/23289638.bbc-slated-insult... [2] https://www.thenational.scot/news/20107509.bbc-refuses-say-h...

EDIT TO ADD (because I can't reply to the @Veen directly)

> Leftists think it's an establishment mouthpiece run by the Tories.

Well....

I see how they could feel that way when the recently appointed BBC Chairman is a chap who appears to have more than a few ties to Boris Johnson[3].

[3] https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/378/digital-cultu...

Re: UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption

#107

Post by jeroenhd »

wiredfool wrote: post #55

If they end end to end encryption, then Signal and Telegram can read the private messages that the leaders inevitably use to get around records retention laws.

While it's technically possible to use Telegram safely, I wouldn't put it in the same category as Signal. Even WhatsApp has a better underlying cryptographic system.

Re: UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption

#108

Post by swexbe »

andromeduck wrote: post #83
chacham15 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be essentially infinitely valuable as a cyberattack target. While I understand what you mean, there are already keys which are "infinitely valuable": root CA keys. If you have those, you can essentially impersonate anyone. Therefore, we must have ways to protect these sort of keys. That being said, a root CA key is probably locked up on an air gapped machine vs some machine which actively using the key to…

but there are multiple roots

There are also multiple countries

Re: UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption

#109

Post by jeroenhd »

xyzzy4747 wrote: post #8

Ending 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).

It's quite easy, really. It's not hard to find phones communicating with WhatsApp's servers, and the moment WhatsApp indicates it can't decrypt a message for a UK user, fines and arrests can be made. You can simplify it further with Signal and WhatsApp: any UK phone number that can't be decrypted by the golden state decryption key is a problem.

You can get around these restrictions by sending independently encrypted messages over chat apps and through VPNs or Tor using foreign phone numbers, but at the end of the day, a messaging service is only as useful as its network effect. If WhatsApp refuses to forward your encrypted messages because your mom or friend or boss doesn't always keep their circumvention VPN on, you don't have much of a choice.

Calling these bans "ending math" is like calling speeding tickets attempts to ban physics. People will still use these apps and people will still speed, but the majority of the population won't because when you're caught you're paying a hefty fine (or worse).

Re: UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption

#110

Post by usrbinbash »

seanhunter wrote: post #13

The 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…

> Diffie just started by explaining ...

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2140747-laws-of-mathema...

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