Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

fortune.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 409 posts

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

#81

Post by immibis »

vasco wrote: post #66
immibis wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well, I suppose you get to decide whether you want to fight for the slaves or the slave owners.

I will remind you that fighting for the slave owners never led to anything good.

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

#82

Post by ahzhou »

motohagiography wrote: post #7

Her television interview with the former(?) minister responsible for this abomination of a law was urgent and necessary. These legislators know what they are doing, and that it is unethical. Let Signal leave the UK market. If the people want freedom, let them take it themselves. Perhaps before this generation of young men are rounded up for another one of history's meat grinders in Ukraine, as a means to further redu…

Your insinuation that the UK will implement a Ukraine war draft in order to advance a totalitarian agenda is weird, unnecessarily conspiratorial, and dilutes your point. I encourage you to make one point and to make it well.

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

#83

Post by immibis »

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.

Oh, politicians' messages won't be scanned. They'll make sure of that. Only the peons will have their messages scanned.

The French law that makes it legal for the government to hack your phone has a bunch of exceptions so it's not legal for the government to hack important people's phones.

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

#84

Post by DaSHacka »

zirgs wrote: post #28
cwales95 wrote: post #5

Related post from 10 days ago which goes into more depth on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36596610 TL;DR: UK government wants to degrade public's right to privacy / encryption under the guise of "but think of the children!"

What about the privacy of children? I don't want some creeps reading their messages.

Well, consider what job a creep who loves to invade children's privacy would have.

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

#85

Post by immibis »

enigmurl wrote: post #43
pacifika wrote: post #38

Hasn’t Apple already shown it’s possible to add another party silently to an encrypted exchange? > Passwords: Users can now create a group to share a set of passwords. Everyone in a group can add and edit passwords to keep them up to date, and since sharing is through iCloud Keychain, it’s end-to-end encrypted. So there goes the backdoor encryption argument, it’s possible to add another member to a group of people wi…

Isnt this more analogous to an end-to-end encrypted group chat than a backdoor?

Secretly turning every two-party encrypted conversation into a three-party encrypted conversation is a backdoor.

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

#86

Post by norir »

derefr wrote: post #71
23B1 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why the Federalist Papers are some of the most important documents when understanding the intent of the Constitution and Bill of Rights – and simultaneously the least read! I'm not saying that case law isn't also an important aspect of the 'law' and that the constitution shouldn't be amended – I'm not really a hardcore 'originalist' – I just mean that any time a SCOTUS ruling comes out, it's clear that in the…

There seems to be a function missing from government. All governments, AFAICT. Legislators change the law (including, rarely, the constitution) — effectively by applying a hierarchy of "countermanding orders" — to suit the changing interests of the public. Courts interpret the law, but only downstream of legislation. The executive can make regulation and executive orders, but only in agreement with the law. But at th…

I like this idea. A somewhat related idea I've had is that instead of giving the supreme court ultimate power to overrule and/or reinterpret existing legislation they instead would be given power to call a referendum. Each justice would have the ability to attach their own revised version of the law to the referendum and there would be a voting process to determine which version of the law to accept as canonical. This would prevent the kind of situation we have right now where the court is controlled by a minority group that is imposing its views with impunity. So long as there is but one voice on the court that represents the majority public interest, the public can win out (provided elections are free and fair of course). Right now, regardless of where you fall ideologically, it is clear that the structure of the court can be exploited to impose a vision of the country that does not reflect the wishes of most of its citizens. Even those who feel ideologically aligned with the supermajority court should be concerned with the tact they are taking. It's destabilizing and planting the seeds for the institution's demise.

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

#87

Post by ipv6ipv4 »

This is the lasting legacy of Apple’s CSAM photo scanning debacle. Apple mainstreamed the concept, demoed the dystopian tool, and legitimized the discourse of this dystopian insanity.

Apple executives should be ashamed of their direct role in this.

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

#88

Post by maqp »

_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.

So how are you backdooring the client that -- where ever you download it from -- can be dumped from the phone and compared against self compiled client with a cryptographic hash?

Introducing intentional, ubiquitous vulnerabilities is also a terrible idea, because exploits for those can leak or be stolen (that has already happened, see Shadow Brokers case), and that's catastrophic in operating systems, because they're massively scalable.

Rootkits injected via such vulnerabilities can covertly make systems so that the vulnerability and backdoor are unpatchable, and that would be a catastrophic scenario.

>Signal can scan messages before encryption and report to the authorities just fine

Writing a script that comments out the lines of code for such scanning, and that compiles the application from source is trivial.

People write E2EE layers on top of existing messaging apps. One example is OTR plugin for Pidgin/Gaim, another is CryptoCat that at one point had a system that operated on top of Facebook web UI.

The genie is out of the bottle, and the bad guys are willing to go the distance to get secure comms. Bin Laden was using airgaps. Criminals are buying crypto phones (that ANOM case was fun example of smart targeted attack though, maybe that can be used to catch some criminals in future too). What's left is the security of normal people from banana dictatorships, mass surveillance tools etc. When you backdoor privacy tools, that's who you'll get, and if that's who you're going after, then you have no right to wield such power.

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

#89

Post by Eisenstein »

vasco wrote: post #66
immibis wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This is the problem with trying to fit a political doctrine written more than 100 years ago by an academic who spent most of his time in libraries into modern life.

There is a reason 'it was a good idea so I wrote it all down, thought of everything, and then forced everyone to do it' has never worked.

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

#90

Post by motohagiography »

chmod600 wrote: post #31

The water flowed under this bridge 20 years ago. This whole discussion seems like it’s happening in the wrong decade. The issue now is that it’s so easy to collect circumstantial information that is constantly leaked by GPS-enabled apps, searches, card purchases, clicks, cell phone tower data, etc. that governments don’t really need the actual contents of messages any more. I’m still glad Signal exists, but it’s part…

I wore a "this t-shirt is a munition" tee back in the day. With a quarter century of hindsight, I think encryption as a privacy tool may not have been a solution, but a sedative that prevented the smartest people from seeing how bad things really were and applying their courage to those problems.
Post reply on HN