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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

#161

Post by godelski »

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…

> Governments seem to want to have it both ways

I think it even goes a bit deeper. Surveillance in a democracy is a double edged sword and arguably the edge facing yourself is sharper. You want it so you can keep a close eye on your citizens and manipulate or adapt to their moods. But on the other side, adversaries are also equally capable of doing this (as NK demonstrates, software is a cheap form of warfare). Often adversaries who are more than happy to team up and pool resources. They're just sharpening the edge pointing at yourself. It really is a dangerous game to play.

I know red teaming is harder than blue teaming, but I really believe that the NSA's primary objective should be defense rather than offense. Especially as we're talking about the modern era of LLMs which will be used to convincingly sound like humans and influence people at mass scale, defense just becomes even more important. The mice are running wild and our cat is too fat and lazy to catch them. That was fine when we were ahead of everyone else, but now that they've caught up our cat needs to get off its lazy ass and do its job.

> anonymous cash transactions => ???

This was actually the first hint that I had that cryptocurrencies were a scam. That people were more interested in flashy than secure (e.g. zcash). I'd love to live in a world with fast anonymous digital _cash_ but I'm not sure that'll happen and not sure it'll be blockchain based.

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

#162

Post by immibis »

leesalminen wrote: post #139
jononomo wrote: post #127

How can the Signal app "exit the UK market"? Can't people just use the app anyway?

There's a couple ways: - Signal could just ban all UK IP addresses from accessing its messaging servers. Your encrypted messages still pass through servers controlled by Signal, Inc. - UK government could require ISPs to deny access to Signal's messaging servers. Of course, one could just use a VPN, set up a VM in a third country and run a Signal Proxy Server, etc. It was hard enough getting family/friends to downloa…

Signal gets banned from the Google and Apple stores for UK users

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

#163

Post by AmericanChopper »

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.

It’s imaginary in the sense that no matter who wins an election, you’re going to end up with substantially the same government every time. If you’re so concerned with political tribalism that you can’t see how utterly corrupt your own team is, then you’ve simply fallen for the distraction.

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

#164

Post by derefr »

avianlyric wrote: post #148
mcpackieh wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 l…

I don’t see how a Tally stick results in non-anonymous transactions. It’s just a basic way to create an arbitrary non-fungible physical token, just like a door key.

The authorities holding the sticks are acting as a public ledger, in that they bear witness to person A originally handing them half of stick A — and they could write that association down, if they like (picture a little tag saying "person A" wrapped around stick A in their stick storage closet); but even if they don't write it down, they may just remember the person, remember the probably-pretty-unique-looking stick, and mentally associate the two.

Then, when person B comes around with the other half of stick A, they won't know all the hands it passed through in the meantime, but they'll at least know that person A and person B were connected through some chain of equal-value trades that didn't require "breaking" the stick.

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

#165

Post by godelski »

tcfhgj wrote: post #103
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

> because everything is closed source

We have to be clear that closed source doesn't imply vulnerabilities. It just means it is hard to check. But we are also talking about one of the most researched devices w.r.t. security. If a backdoor is ever found, boy will there be hell to pay and I'm pretty sure Apple shares will take a really big hit. Especially as they've pivoted their marketing towards privacy.

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

#166

Post by kelnos »

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?

I think the problem is a pretty old one: you can't use technology to solve social problems. Encryption as a tool is great for some particular kinds of privacy, but using encryption to "fix" privacy was misguided from the start. Privacy is a policy problem; we need laws on the books that prevent both governments and companies from collecting and using data about us.

Rules like the US Constitution's 4th amendment, and laws like the GDPR (and to some extent, CCPA/CPRA) aim to do that, but neither goes anywhere near far enough. 4A often gets interpreted narrowly by US courts, to the benefit of law enforcement. And the GDPR enforcement mechanisms are far too clunky and -- at least from what I've seen so far -- don't work particularly well. Not to mention that, for it to be truly effective globally, the US would need a federal-level law to match it.

Encryption alone doesn't matter. If your social and political climate is not oriented toward privacy, your privacy tools can simply be made illegal.

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

#167

Post by guy98238710 »

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!"

One could easily argue that bullying in school is a much more widespread threat to children and the government is okay with that.

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

#168

Post by Eisenstein »

kelnos wrote: post #154
Eisenstein wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have noticed that people who are steadfast in positions and don't listen to reason and subscribe to 'identity' politics on both the left and right differ mainly in where they were raised and by who raised them. The Berkeley folk who mandate it illegal to burn wood in your own fireplace have more in common with people who think trans people should be forced to live as the gender defined at birth than they do with pe…

I'll start off by saying I don't have a solution. But if I don't have any alternatives, I'd much rather have the "you can't burn wood in your fireplace" people in charge than the "force people to live as the gender assigned at birth" people. One of those people is pushing policy that ultimately saves the human race from making the planet uninhabitable, while the other is imposing their small-minded religious worldvie…

I agree with you on all points.

I was straining to think of a good example of the 'left-wing authoritarian' but I have definitely experienced it, and apart the location of birth they are the same exact people who are just as intolerant on right.

On aggregate all humans operate pretty much the same everywhere in the way they think and operate -- the only difference is experiences and culture. That was the the point I was making -- we are never going to be rid of the people responsible for throwing wrenches in the political works.

Tangent: I think the only way this gets fixed is by putting a benevolent AI in charge of everything.

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

#169

Post by kelnos »

Teckentrup wrote: post #130

What does exit the UK market mean here though? Presumably that it won't appear in the Apple App Store or Google Play? Presumably that's more of an issue for the iOS ecosystem... But for android you just switch from using play to FDroid or an APK, right? I presume a sufficiently irked UK wouldn't be able to do anything more, as Signal already as ways of circumventing traffic blocking within specific states? Doesn't th…

It's more symbolic than anything else. The Signal folks don't really care how effective this action would be. Sure, they can pull the app from the app stores for the UK region, disable any accounts registered with a UK phone number and/or block connection attempts from UK IP addresses. Some people will work around it, but many won't have the technical know-how to do so. The end result that's important, though, is that the Signal Foundation will be able to announce "due to anti-privacy laws enacted in the UK, Signal can no longer provide service in the UK".

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

#170

Post by Eisenstein »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #155
Eisenstein wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't need to follow everything to a T to grasp the fact that 99.99% of us exist to feed the capitalists, the ruling class, to keep them satisfied.

I'm sorry you think that your life is only meaningful in that it provides labor to capitalists.
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