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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

#101

Post by [deleted] »

hammock wrote: post #96
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…

> The people who invented "using gold coins as a common exchange for barter" weren't thinking about anonymity What makes you say that anonymity wasn’t a concern? I have a hard time believing that claim without any substantiation. Anonymity in market participation and transactions has been an important consideration for millennia. Anyone who has watched Jasmine put on peasant clothes and visit the market in Disney’s A…

[deleted]

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

#102

Post by nradov »

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…

US courts sometimes look to records of debates in the legislature when deciding how to interpret a particular law.

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

#103

Post by tcfhgj »

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…

Apple is developing the whole OS, they can always snoop, because everything is closed source. Also I loud backup isn't e2ee anyways

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

#104

Post by hammock »

avianlyric wrote: post #99
hammock wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people who invented "using gold coins as a common exchange for barter" weren't thinking about anonymity What makes you say that anonymity wasn’t a concern? I have a hard time believing that claim without any substantiation. Anonymity in market participation and transactions has been an important consideration for millennia. Anyone who has watched Jasmine put on peasant clothes and visit the market in Disney’s A…

> What makes you say that anonymity wasn’t a concern? I have a hard time believing that claim without any substantiation. Because the inverse claim, “people using gold coins thousands of years ago for common exchange were worried about the anonymity of their transactions”, is absurd. It’s not like the alternative to gold coins two millennia ago was a traceable currency, the technology for tracking a large population…

>The inverse claim, “people using gold coins thousands of years ago for common exchange were worried about the anonymity of their transactions”, is absurd.

Can you explain why? I have already given a historical example to the contrary (granted a fictional one but one based on similar true accounts)

The ancient Romans invented the Census to reliably track every person. It seems a little goofy to suggest that they “couldn’t possibly conceive” of a similar accounting of transactions

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

#105

Post by avianlyric »

CaptainMarvel wrote: post #79
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>being ruled by a family Nice hyperbole. Western monarchs have no real political power. They're just figureheads whose wealth is continually financed by the state. Which is stupid, but they're not rulers of anything other than their own lavish properties.

Utter rubbish. Prime ministers have long held weekly audiences with the monarch. The monarch has the right to review legislation before it is put to parliament. That mechanism has been used to change laws - in your lifetime, on this side of the century. These are just three examples from the top of my head.

Sorry those are three examples of what? They don’t shout unconstrained political power to me, they don’t even shout political power at all.

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

#106

Post by avianlyric »

borski wrote: post #100
CaptainMarvel wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Utter rubbish. Prime ministers have long held weekly audiences with the monarch. The monarch has the right to review legislation before it is put to parliament. That mechanism has been used to change laws - in your lifetime, on this side of the century. These are just three examples from the top of my head.

> That mechanism has been used to change laws - in your lifetime, on this side of the century. I have no bone to pick, not knowing anything about the royal family, but do you have any examples of this happening?

There’s a number of UK laws with odd carve-outs for the royal family. A notable one is the Equality Act where there is a carve-out that allows the Royal family to discriminate with its hiring practices in a way that would be illegal for any other organisation.

I don’t think there are any examples of significant changes to provisional laws, but certainly tweaks to make sure the royal family doesn’t have to keep with the times.

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

#107

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

throw0101a wrote: post #12
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…

> Her television interview […] Channel 4 News segment: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E--bVV_eQR0 The MP, Damian Collins, "who formerly served as a junior Minister for Tech and the Digital Economy in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport": * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damian_Collins Reminder: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...

Thanks very much for posting that interview. I thought it was good (and honestly impressed that it was quite respectful communication all the way around, as opposed to so often what I see as "debates" on TV), but I admit I got super frustrated to the point I could only watch half of it because nobody wanted to clearly admit to the other side's quite obvious point.

I think the Signal president was making great points, but she definitely was avoiding a clear response when asked about "If people are sharing CSAM on your platform, you wouldn't know about it, correct?" and "If people are violating your ToS, how would you enforce that?"

Obviously, the clearest direct answer is "Correct, we would have no way of knowing what content is being shared on our service." She complained about "circling the drain on the issue", but the reason they were circling is that she didn't want to say that sentence. And I get it, in today's day and age news organizations love to take a quote out of context and make it the headline ("Signal president admits they can't enforce their ToS against illegal material!!")

But debates like this are a waste of time when both sides refuse to admit the obvious implications of the other side's points:

1. The Signal president was making very clear there is no "halfway" encryption, that it either works or it doesn't, and the bill required a back door. The government minister was pretending and talking loads of BS about what "options the regulator has", even while conceding the point that you can't have a backdoor that only "the good guys" can use. What an exercise in cognitive dissonance.

2. The Signal president obviously knew "Yes, people can share CSAM on our service and we can't directly know about that content", but (and I think for good reasons) didn't want to say that obvious point out loud.

This debate would make more sense if both sides would just admit there is no "halfway compromise" to this issue. I agree with another comment that Apple really fucked up by thinking their "fingerprinting" approach was technically viable, and that somewhat poisoned the well in this debate.

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

#108

Post by varenc »

hammock wrote: post #104
avianlyric wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What makes you say that anonymity wasn’t a concern? I have a hard time believing that claim without any substantiation. Because the inverse claim, “people using gold coins thousands of years ago for common exchange were worried about the anonymity of their transactions”, is absurd. It’s not like the alternative to gold coins two millennia ago was a traceable currency, the technology for tracking a large population…

>The inverse claim, “people using gold coins thousands of years ago for common exchange were worried about the anonymity of their transactions”, is absurd. Can you explain why? I have already given a historical example to the contrary (granted a fictional one but one based on similar true accounts) The ancient Romans invented the Census to reliably track every person. It seems a little goofy to suggest that they “cou…

How would the Romans, or anyone else, have implemented practical tracking for every day transactions? Is there a single historical example of this being done in the pre-digital world? The Census is a survey of people/household/assets, but logging all exchanges of currency is several orders of magnitude more records. I can’t really think of any practical way this could have been done, especially when assuming some people would be adversarial to the tracking (which are exactly the transactions you’d want to track)

Not saying they didn’t see anonymity as a desirable property of transactions, but I don’t take this as proof that they definitely did.

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

#109

Post by mcpackieh »

avianlyric wrote: post #99
hammock wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people who invented "using gold coins as a common exchange for barter" weren't thinking about anonymity What makes you say that anonymity wasn’t a concern? I have a hard time believing that claim without any substantiation. Anonymity in market participation and transactions has been an important consideration for millennia. Anyone who has watched Jasmine put on peasant clothes and visit the market in Disney’s A…

> What makes you say that anonymity wasn’t a concern? I have a hard time believing that claim without any substantiation. Because the inverse claim, “people using gold coins thousands of years ago for common exchange were worried about the anonymity of their transactions”, is absurd. It’s not like the alternative to gold coins two millennia ago was a traceable currency, the technology for tracking a large population…

> It’s not like the alternative to gold coins two millennia ago was a traceable currency

There actually was, predating gold coins in fact. What people did was carve notches representing quantities into sticks. The sticks were then split down the middle such that they could be lined back up to verify that both came from the original stick and the notches lined up. One of these halves would then often be entrusted to local officials for safekeeping. When people wanted to settle accounts, they could meet up with their half of the stick, light them up and make new cuts.

(Of course this doesn't prove that gold coins were created to facilitate anonymity.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick

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

#110

Post by hammock »

23B1 wrote: post #37
jacquesm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, the government isn't dropping bombs on London, but the ends are the same. They're very much not. Wat a complete nonsense.

You're right – in the short term. In the mid- to long-term, I'm not so sure.

What about those new movies?
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