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Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

fortune.com

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Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#61

Post by throw0101a »

Sai_ wrote: post #30
throw0101a wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the record, GCHQ created RSA in 1973 and then DH in 1974: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography#Histor... DH qua DH was invented in 1976, and RSA qua RSA in 1977.

What does qua mean here?

There is "RSA" as implemented by GCHQ in 1973, and there is "RSA" as RSA like we generally know it by the three folks that it was named after. There is "DH" as implemented by GCHQ in 1974, and there is "DH" as DH like we generally know by the two folks that it was named after.

The concept "x" as we (generally) know x is what qua means. (Because words can mean and point to potentially many concepts.)

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#62

Post by grayhatter »

Xarodon wrote: post #11
immibis wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't aware the Russian army was recruiting from the UK?

Are we just being obtuse now? Is that what we're doing?

responding to hyperbole with hyperbole is appropriate isn't it?

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#63

Post by [deleted] »

andy_ppp wrote: post #33
rjsw wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would avoid losing access to all your messages if you forget the PIN for your phone.

I find it interesting they ask for these abilities when I suspect GCHQ is in and out of everyone’s phones if they want to be - certainly the idea Boris’s messages can’t be found is laughable. I am surprised they haven’t set up any security focused messaging apps that operate as honeypots for the monitoring of criminality…

[deleted]

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#64

Post by hkt »

Sai_ wrote: post #30
throw0101a wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the record, GCHQ created RSA in 1973 and then DH in 1974: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography#Histor... DH qua DH was invented in 1976, and RSA qua RSA in 1977.

What does qua mean here?

"as"

He means DH, as in Diffie Hellman, was not the first approach to key exchange. The difference is that in the UK we did what we usually do: we squandered an amazing innovation and let some other country benefit from it.

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#65

Post by Hizonner »

martin8412 wrote: post #36
andy_ppp wrote: post #10

Who persuades politicians it’s a good idea for the security services to be able to scan all their messages? I am absolutely certain that the politicians have absolutely no clue what they’re being asked to implement.

The laws don't apply to politicians, in fact they're explicitly excluded.

In practice, they often use the same services as everybody else, even for official business that they're not supposed to use them for. Sometimes they do that to intentionally try to get around archiving and transparency rules. Other times they do it because they're clueless and/or lazy.

Those services don't know that an account belongs to a politician or that they're using it for exempt purposes.

Politicians are ALWAYS getting nailed by leaks from various computer-based communication systems that they use. Most of them don't seem to be able to get their heads around how any of this work.

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#66

Post by vasco »

immibis wrote: post #53
vasco wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even know what my class is! Where do I check? How do you know what class you are? I want to know who to help!

Do you get money by working (most people) or do you get money by making other people who work give you theirs (e.g. landlord, CEO, banker (not teller), politician)?

I've had a job all my life but with the proceeds from that job I've bought a house I rent to a local association, and I also have a retirement plan (as pretty much everyone else), so I'm a shareholder in almost all the biggest megacorps through the indexes my retirement account buys.

So I'm both? Who do I fight for?

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#67

Post by jstummbillig »

semiquaver wrote: post #4

Governments seem to want to have it both ways. As new technologies are introduced they assume that capabilities and practices available to analogous predecessors must remain available to them (e.g. wire-tapping phones => undermining cryptography) but they don’t feel the same way about public benefits or rights associated with other technology that is being replaced (anonymous cash transactions => ???) It also seems l…

Well yes, they do. Encryption is a real issue for the mandate of a government, and also a real solution for other parts of the mandate of a government.

It's not like we (as the broad community) are engaging with empathy. Even if there is maybe no great solution to the whole dilemma, it would help the entire thing, if we stopped camping on one side so entirely.

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#68

Post by Hizonner »

_8j50 wrote: post #34

> “You cannot create a back door that only the good guys can go through,” Alright, technical argument here. This is false and tech talking heads are spreading this lie for ideological reasons. You don't need to backdoor the protocol, just the specific targeted client. Now, if Signal said this is unfair because competitors won't also backdoor their app then I am with them. What the UK should probably have done is to f…

> You don't need to backdoor the protocol, just the specific targeted client.

Distinction without a difference. Either way, the total system is delivering the same plaintext to the same third parties.

On edit: and, just to be clear, they want the apps to scan for specific hashes from a master list, and/or apply ML to find "suspicious" material that's NOT in any lists, on EVERY client, not just "targeted" ones. That's true for the UK "Online Safety Bill", for the EU "chat control" or "anti-CSA" proposal, and in fact for the practical effect they're trying to get in the US with the "Earn It Act", "Stop CSAM Act", and to some degree with the "Kids Online Safety Act".

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#69

Post by smugma »

domador wrote: post #54
derefr wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but they don’t feel the same way about public benefits or rights associated with other technology that is being replaced When the government creates a law within recorded history — something like a wiretapping law — then the spirit of the law is well-known at time of creation. Usually, that "spirit" is that it's created to explicitly grant a capability to the government to do a thing for the benefit of the public u…

Society should require that the spirit and purpose of any law be included as a preamble to that law's text and be used in the interpretation, application, and future adaptation of that law. The spirit and purpose may be obvious at the time, but won't necessarily be that way to future generations. Laws with no explanation about their purpose or goals are like the compiled binaries of a program. Ideally, in the future…

That’s more aligned with countries that follow civil law work. They define the law and what it covers.

In contrast, common law is more open to interpretation, changes over time, etc.

Yes, this is super generalized, but the dichotomy explains two very different approaches to how countries approach their writing and interpreting of laws.

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#70

Post by AmericanChopper »

semiquaver wrote: post #4

Governments seem to want to have it both ways. As new technologies are introduced they assume that capabilities and practices available to analogous predecessors must remain available to them (e.g. wire-tapping phones => undermining cryptography) but they don’t feel the same way about public benefits or rights associated with other technology that is being replaced (anonymous cash transactions => ???) It also seems l…

All governments will trend towards tyranny if left unsupervised. Imo western democracies have been entirely subverted by an imaginary left/right conflict, where you end up with exactly the same thing no matter who you elect. The voting population is so completely engrossed with their contempt for either the detestable “left wing” tyrants, or the detestable “right wing” tyrants that they can’t see the side they end up supporting is just as corrupt as the side they hate, and almost identical in every way except rhetoric.
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