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

globalencryption.org

211–220 of 240 posts

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

#211

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.

You should try reading some of his non-fiction. This was written in 1944:

"I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible."

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

#212
post #203
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing inherently wrong with anarchy, but there are plenty of things inherently wrong with totalitarianism. I really don't care how many pedophiles we catch if we continue to expand the definition of pedophiles to "everyone we don't like". Similarly, I don't care how many terrorists we catch if we motivate everyone to become a "terrorist" in the process.

False dichotomy. Every restriction on freedom does not have to be reduced to totalitarianist encroachment.

That's what they say every time - "it's just to catch the REALLY bad guys, pinky promise". Then five years later we find out that it's routinely used for other things. And ten years later, when the law needs to be renewed or whatever, the same politicians who originally argued that it was a very narrowly tailored measure claim that it became such an important tool in law enforcement arsenal that sky would literally fall if we don't allow them to keep it.

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

#213
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False dichotomy. Every restriction on freedom does not have to be reduced to totalitarianist encroachment.

That's what they say every time - "it's just to catch the REALLY bad guys, pinky promise". Then five years later we find out that it's routinely used for other things. And ten years later, when the law needs to be renewed or whatever, the same politicians who originally argued that it was a very narrowly tailored measure claim that it became such an important tool in law enforcement arsenal that sky would literally f…

Law enforcement gonna exploit outrage. Evidently so will encryption fans. Both are politicians, in the sense that matters of state powers are of interest to both; and thus both wield hyperbole: "down with terrorists" vs "down with Big Brother".

Maybe let's not fall to 10-foot tall syndrome in either direction. Two things can be true: law enforcement is overstating terrorism and criminal dangers that it's facing, and encryption advocates are overstating totalitarianist danger.

Maybe the problem is that in many Western countries there isn't a huge smoking gun where surveillance powers are "routinely used" for visibly nefarious things. Even things as bad as Snowden exposed (and they were shocking) don't seem to resonate with a lot of folks, maybe because it doesn't seem like the govt was actually able to do anything with all the data that they grabbed anyways. In the US, I haven't really heard of cops blackmailing people over intercepted data, for example. Or jailing of political opponents based on their online habits.

I'm not sure if encryption fans are either not looking to be in office, or not popular enough to be elected. But if it's an issue people care about a lot, there should be no problems getting elected on that issue. Don't be on HN taking to me, go talk to some random people and see how they want to vote on that issue or if they even care. But maybe, just maybe, you'll find that there are other things on their mind right now.

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

#214
post #181
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Century of Self is a BBC documentary about Bernays and his propaganda models. It's quite good and available on yt.

Watch everything by Adam Curtis. Century of the Self, The Trap and The Power of Nightmares specifically. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0193231/

Suspiciously absent from every streaming service over here. But at least Century of the Self has been uploaded to Youtube.

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

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

barthes mythologies

The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord

Simulacra and Simulation. And other works by Jean Baudrillard. His philosophy focuses on the unreal nature of contemporary culture due to mass communication and mass consumption.

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

#216
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…

> I'm afraid it's not going to be hard, over the years, to find enough pedophiles and terrorists to make a compellingly popular case for more regulation of encryption. You're going to oppress the world's entire population of human beings with warrantless global surveillance because of a few "pedophiles and terrorists"? What a tiresome argument, seriously. Go ahead and find us thousands of "pedophiles and terrorists".…

>You're going to oppress the world's entire population of human beings with warrantless global surveillance

Its already happening with financial transactions, regular speech is not far behind.

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

#217
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as currently perpetrated in the large by Apple, and spun even by people here as a worthwhile tradeoff for "security" See this misses the more nuanced point. I bet my last cent that everyone who doesn't want Apple's ability to meaningfully control their platform eroded would change their tune immediately if we had a regulatory environment that had any teeth whatsoever when it comes to policing malicious software. Pe…

> I bet my last cent that everyone who doesn't want Apple's ability to meaningfully control their platform eroded would change their tune immediately if we had a regulatory environment that had any teeth whatsoever when it comes to policing malicious software. I definitely would change my mind. The complete lack of any effective protections against bad actors is the sole reason I'm willing to tolerate what Apple is d…

Those who exchange freedom for security deserve neither.

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

#218

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…

« Complotist! »

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

#219
post #174
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Absolutely, but only if that code is running when the user supplies the password. I mentioned this possibility as well.

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

#220
post #183
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could create a build with unlock attempts removed, making it possible to brute-force weaker unlock schemes. That's what they didn't want to do because if they created something like that they would lose a lot of customers.

Are unlock attempt limits not built into the security chip?

I wasn't sure about that so I erred on the side of caution, but I do think that is how it works yes.
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