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Statement on EU-US Cooperation on Turning Public Opinion Against Encryption

globalencryption.org

171–180 of 240 posts

Re: Statement on EU-US Cooperation on Turning Public Opinion Against Encryption

#171
post #9
post #2

> ...at the EU-US Senior Officials Meeting on Justice and Home Affairs, held in Stockholm on 16 and 17 March, the minutes of which are now available. The delegations “… concurred on the need to mirror privacy by design with lawful access by design…,” apparent code language for mandating the undermining or removal of strong encryption practices. What is wrong with these people? How can anyone, let alone an educated, w…

Power I guess, only because they can. But if you communicate by Cell Phone (txt, email...), encryption can be stopped by law only because they are closed systems. But I tend to believe Cell Phones already come with a backdoor, so laws do not really matter for those. If using gpg via email on an Open System (Linux, BSDs), good luck stopping that.

> using gpg via email on an Open System (Linux, BSDs), good luck stopping that

They won't engage us on those terms. They'll use their authority to pass laws saying use of cryptography strong enough to defeat them is evidence of guilt. Judges will instruct juries to assume there's CSAM in your encrypted hard drive.

Re: Statement on EU-US Cooperation on Turning Public Opinion Against Encryption

#172
post #145

>As we have stated in the past, there is no effective way to weaken encryption for some use cases such as law enforcement while keeping it strong for others. I've never been fully satisfied by this assertion. Apple has the ability to push whatever code it wants to whatever device it wants. They can make a version of iOS that bypasses encryption and restrict it to only run on devices identified by a warrant. They coul…

In the current world Apple is not actually able to compromise your iPhone, warrant or not, by design (remember the whole FBI debacle?). Encryption is done through separate hardware on the phone that they can’t remotely bypass. In the world you’re proposing they would have to be legally compelled to engineer a weaker system. That’s the problem.

You already can't sideload Signal on an iPhone. The Apple store is a single point of failure that's being ignored by too many.

Re: Statement on EU-US Cooperation on Turning Public Opinion Against Encryption

#173
I don't understand the crusade against encryption. No ban has any chance of actually being effective at stopping criminals, they will just continue using open source software. All you end up doing is exposing law abiding citizens and corporations to an incredible amount of risk, because suddenly all their critical private data is secured with a common backdoor that can be abused by anyone who finds it. Adding backdoors to commercial encryption is practically handing the Kremlin or CCP the keys to all our critical infrastructure.

Re: Statement on EU-US Cooperation on Turning Public Opinion Against Encryption

#174
post #149

>As we have stated in the past, there is no effective way to weaken encryption for some use cases such as law enforcement while keeping it strong for others. I've never been fully satisfied by this assertion. Apple has the ability to push whatever code it wants to whatever device it wants. They can make a version of iOS that bypasses encryption and restrict it to only run on devices identified by a warrant. They coul…

> What am I missing? The fact that this is not how security on iPhones works at all. There are unencrypted partitions of the storage yes, which means the device can boot into iOS without any user password, but the ones containing user data are encrypted and an OS update can at best remove the limit on how fast or how many times you can attempt to unlock the user data (or rather the Secure Enclave which stores the act…

an OS update can at best remove the limit on how fast or how many times you can attempt to unlock the user data

Wouldn't an OS update be able to store the user password in a plain text file on the non-encrypted partitions? I don't think those partitions are hardwired to be readonly until the rest of the system is unlocked?

Re: Statement on EU-US Cooperation on Turning Public Opinion Against Encryption

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1984 was a warning, not a manual! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen

I finished reading the book yesterday. I truly believe Orwell was a time traveler. (joke) The parallels between Oceania and some nations of the world nowadays is infinite.

[deleted]

Re: Statement on EU-US Cooperation on Turning Public Opinion Against Encryption

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or instantly. politicians are people and I'm pretty sure they use phones. if a backdoor is added it will almost instantly be used against them I'm sure. even well meaning apps are hacked.

This is where you’re wrong. Inconvenient rules don’t apply to them. They can engage in insider training and enrich themselves. They can disarm the public while they are protected by armed security. They will lay our secrets bare while maintaining theirs. They will use national security as an excuse to keep their encryption while taking ours away.

Progressively… politician has become the new used-car-salesman as a profession …

Re: Statement on EU-US Cooperation on Turning Public Opinion Against Encryption

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1984 was a warning, not a manual! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen

I finished reading the book yesterday. I truly believe Orwell was a time traveler. (joke) The parallels between Oceania and some nations of the world nowadays is infinite.

Now every time I see a war or natural disaster story on the 6 o'clock news I have the movie adaptation's voice in my head saying "Oceania is continually at war with East Asia"

Re: Statement on EU-US Cooperation on Turning Public Opinion Against Encryption

#178
post #96

Contrarian opinion ahead. We live in a very unique period of history - a bubble really - in which governments are not able to intercept certain communications or decrypt certain records, even with the full force of the law behind them. While I recognize and appreciate, on a personal level, the freedom that this provides me, freedom exists only to the extent that there is a government enforcing boundaries on freedom t…

>freedom exists only to the extent that there is a government enforcing boundaries on freedom to prevent it from turning into anarchy

No, it doesn't. Which is trivial to prove, considering we have had widely available encryption for two decades now with no anarchy or encryption fueled societal collapse in sight. Actually, countries without backdoor laws are some of the most prosperous and safe places on earth. And even western countries that have decided to chase after the encryption boogeyman (Australia, for example) didn't experience a drop in crime rates.

Re: Statement on EU-US Cooperation on Turning Public Opinion Against Encryption

#179
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A law prohibiting child porn would make child porn illegal, not monitor my transactions and prevent encryption. That’s called the redistribution of consequences.

Generally merely declaring something to be illegal does not stop it. In most cases it also requires catching people that are doing it and successfully convicting them.

Invading random people's lives with dragnet spying to see if they have committed a crime was specifically forbidden by the fourth amendment of the US constitution for good reason, even if everyone in our government willfully forgot that amendment exists.

Re: Statement on EU-US Cooperation on Turning Public Opinion Against Encryption

#180

Interesting how our leaders see their role not as representing our interests, but in shaping our interests. There exists an entire subject in political science dealing with how to increase compliance with the schemes of regulators (see Nudge Theory). The mistake they make is a classic short-run vs. long-run miscalculation. In the short-run, you can get away with these kinds of tactics to increase compliance. For exam…

> The mistake they make is a classic short-run vs. long-run miscalculation. In the short-run, you can get away with these kinds of tactics to increase compliance.

...

> But in the long-run, people will become more familiar with these tactics, such that they will become less effective (e.g. waning trust in the media).

I though that too ~20 years ago. I live in a small country with elections every few years (usually less than the full term of the government) and a "one supposedly rightwing party" vs. "a bunch of supposedly left wing parties"... the mix of left wing parties also slowly turned to "a new face + a bunch of old parties" recently.

Every pre-election period we get a bunch of people advocating online and in person, that if "party X" got elected, they'd solve the "problem Y", because they can do it, and "current party" is blocking them... somehow those same people (and not just fresh 18yo going for their first election) forget, that party X has been in the government 3 years ago, and the government before that, and before that, and that the "problem Y" has existed for atleast 20 years (healthcare, housing,...), and they did nothing.

People either forget or are gaslighted by the media.

> assassination attempts

This happens when problems get unsolved and worse and worse for years... bad healthcare, especially mental health, depression, drugs, save 10k, but the apartment you wanted is now 30k more expensive, average rent higher than average pension, etc., create more and more people with nothing left to lose.

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