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

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

#181

Post by kelnos »

TheCaptain4815 wrote: post #157

I've always wondered why politicians in America take similar stances (outside of a few like Rand Paul). Even a wild card like Trump should see how unpopular some of these policies are. Are the intelligence agencies really that influential?

The problem is that they aren't as unpopular as you think. Once the government and media trot out the "think of the children" and "law and order" narratives, with a helping of "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide", a lot of people support legally mandated broken encryption.

It's a lot harder to explain to the average voter the negative consequences this has on privacy, in a way that will actually make them upset about it. And many mainstream media agencies don't even bother to try.

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

#182

Post by whatshisface »

pierat wrote: post #177
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…

The Federalist papers are the equivalent of a Medium blog post. And I will treat them as such. Edit: Evidently I've pissed off enough people who drink the red-white-blue kool-aid. -3 at the moment. These newspaper publishings were expressly for the solidification of power at the federal level, and the weakening of the states. And only look closer at what the "federal" powers were about, and it was all about "secur(in…

Maybe a blog post that Tim Berners Lee wrote during the standardization of HTTP.

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

#183

Post by motohagiography »

chmod600 wrote: post #140
motohagiography wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What would we have done differently? All this stuff is really convenient. Would we have really said “no” to turn-by-turn navigation? Avoided online purchases? Used cash for most of our transactions? Printed things out so we don’t use the internet while outside?

You could have recognized that if you even think you need Tor and Signal to protect yourself from your own government, you need to organize politically to install representatives who ensure you don't think you need those things.

We overlook that young people with tech jobs in the 90's humiliated a lot of their peers, ones who went on to pursue messy politcal careers instead of business ones. Those peers learned to hate the knowledge that gave a lot of economic advantages to tech people, and the principles we ultimately used to morally justify it. Privacy, freedom, and anonymity separated us from the all against all power game of elite competition that ran on gossip, compromise, narrative, and mainly a lot of guile.

As art, I think the season five finale of Rick & Morty captured the dynamic pretty well, where Sanchez represents the freedom and security of competence and technology that, more concretely, allowed a lot of genX to disengage from the messy political game represented as the family life of people who didn't have the benefits those skills conferred. While he shares them, in the world of the story, they are still always his.

The evil Morty character is a millenial child politician who believes he can have all those benefits for himself immediately and today instead of waiting to develop and inherit them with time - if he just decieves and betrays Sanchez and destroys the world in which his story (history, get it) represents the ideal he has to live up to to recieve them. Evil Morty the politician doesn't want to be a steward, he wants to be his own god becase the one his grandfather represents is humiliating to him.

Where we are now is that we have these politicains who are actuated by the shame of their impostor syndromes and their envy of the true popular desire that the products of competence provide. These X'ers can't get a 100 person rally going, but some hacker in a basement can do some magic and suddenly actuate the desire of billions like some kind of rockstar without the gatekeepers.

That's what this legislation is about. It's the coup de grace by a resentful pretender elite who have been taken in by people older and much more dangerous than they could ever have percieved.

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

#184

Post by ipv6ipv4 »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #160
ipv6ipv4 wrote: post #87

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.

Nah, this has been coming (and inevitable really) since Snowden prompted the tech companies to introduce e2e messaging. Note that similar laws are being proposed in the UK, EU Australia and Canada (not sure of the latter two tbh).

The idea of pervasive spying has been around forever. The want, and why. Apple mainstreamed, normalized the discourse, and demoed the concept of pre-scanning in the face of E2E. Apple provided the answer for the how.

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

#185

Post by rcarr »

borski wrote: post #152
rcarr wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've vetted over 1000 that may conflict with their interests. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/08/royals-vette...

You missed my point - on any of these 1000 or more, did they change anything or stop them? If not, then it’s largely just procedural, at least in effect. That’s my point.

Yes.

> The Queen successfully lobbied the government to change a draft law in order to conceal her “embarrassing” private wealth from the public, according to documents discovered by the Guardian.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/07/revealed-que...

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

#186

Post by immibis »

mcpackieh wrote: post #116
thatguy0900 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative is the UK drafting people to fight in ukraine, which also makes 0 sense?

Obviously the concern is an escalation of that war which pulls NATO into the conflict fully. I don't believe that's a likely scenario, but being deliberately obtuse isn't the right way address that somebody expressing that concern.

Russia nuking NATO? What is Signal encryption supposed to have to do with it?

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

#187

Post by bpye »

throw0101a wrote: post #16
ben_w wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I assume the UK had some equivalent to the 90s crypto wars in the US where attempts to weaken and backdoor crypto by legal means were pretty decisively defeated. I'm thinking of the fact that GCHQ invented RSA in 1973, four years before Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman publicly described the same system, and only got around to declassifying this in 1997.

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.

I do wonder what the capabilities of GCHQ are today - I guess it’ll be interesting to see in 50 years or whenever it is assuming it gets declassified…

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

#188

Post by semiquaver »

immibis wrote: post #124
AmericanChopper wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right/left is not imaginary. Whoever told you that wants you to think it's imaginary, so you won't bother to oppose them, because you think the opposition to them is just as bad as they are.

Political thought is a high-dimensional space. Many of those are correlated along an axis that people call right/left.

When someone says that right/left is imaginary, what they are often really saying is that they prioritize dimensions in that space that are not strongly correlated with the right/left axis.

Or they’ve observed that policy changes after a change in government are less extreme than they hoped and chalk that up to corruption or insincerity rather than checks and balances in an adversarial system.

Tribalism being what it is, people can mistake the forest for the trees and think that the convenient shorthand we have for a correlated set of values is more strongly defined (more “real”) than it actually is.

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

#189

Post by bpye »

kelnos wrote: post #137
immibis wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The public opinion being in favour of detecting CSAM does not necessarily mean the public opinion is in favour of sending all your photos to GCHQ to check if they're CSAM.

Maybe not, but even the more mild option of Apple/Google doing a local scan of the device, and then secretly sending some sort of result to Apple/Google to take some action, is also pretty awful from a privacy perspective.

Isn’t that basically the plan Apple had, and scrapped, to scan for CSAM on device?

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

#190

Post by staunton »

rcarr wrote: post #118
domador wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To me, the law and programming seem very similar. Any time two parties go to court and a precedent is created, it seems to me like someone is taking the function of the contested law and adding an if statement somewhere in the body that alters what's returned. Having something like this would be akin to having the original ticket specification to look at which is obviously handy when the inevitable disagreements aris…

> To me, the law and programming seem very similar

If that was the case, we wouldn't need lawyers or court hearings. Laws are phrased vaguely on purpose because real life is far too complicated to write down every eventuality and also it's easier to build political consensus for vague laws. That's why we have courts who interpret the law based on precedent and common sense.

A succinct way to see the difference: You want your computer to do exactly what you wrote in the code and nothing else. This is not true of legislation. You want people to do anything that's not explicitly forbidden and tolerate them doing things that are technically forbidden ad long as they don't really cause too much harm, which means laws are written keeping in mind that the system has and needs slack.

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