> A Back Door to Encryption Won't Stop Terrorists
It' not like terrorists use Twitter
A Back Door to Encryption Won't Stop Terrorists
211–220 of 282 posts
Re: A Back Door to Encryption Won't Stop Terrorists
#212I've gotta believe these organizations can find one or two developers among the billions of muslims on this planet. Why wouldn't they just write their own apps for android and call it a day?
They could and they did. They have recruited quite a few people with more than just basic IT knowledge.
Re: A Back Door to Encryption Won't Stop Terrorists
#213Amazing, a government apologist is top comment, I'm sure there's no astro turfing going on here! Ask people who work in policy, the reason things are a certain way is rarely technical, its usually political, which is a qaint way of saying decisions are made by corrupt power brokers.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10590512 and marked it off-topic.
You're not allowed to accuse other users of astroturfing or shilling without evidence. Having an opposing view doesn't count as evidence. If you have sincere suspicion that someone is astroturfing, you're asked to email hn@ycombinator.com. We take such emails seriously, look at the data, and if we find evidence, we act on it. I've explained all this dozens of times:
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix=true&page=0...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix=true&page=0...
If you poke around HN search you'll find cases where we banned people for abusing the site this way, but the overwhelming majority of accusations are just users slinging dirt at users who happen to disagree with them, and we're adamant about that not becoming more of a thing here.
Re: A Back Door to Encryption Won't Stop Terrorists
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
I might even agree with you. But that's no reason to resort to name-calling. Attack the reasoning, not the person.
An apologist is one who defends a particular view, I really am struggling to understand what you intending to express. The OP wrote is wrong, just plainly wrong, he also dismisses out of hand the real concerns of state overreach. I've seen astro turfing on HN before, unfortunately mods seem more interested in sweeping such incidents under the rug than being upfront with the community. Or perhaps HN really isn't very…
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Re: A Back Door to Encryption Won't Stop Terrorists
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
If that was it, why are these terrorists not attacking Armenia? Or Zambia? Or Mexico? Or pretty much anywhere in Central and South America? All those have a higher percentage of Christians in their populations than the US or anywhere in Western Europe, and they don't have the same level of anti-terrorism focus so are presumably easier targets. Could it simply be that those countries haven't been bombing and invading…
> If that was it, why are these terrorists not attacking Armenia? Or Zambia? Or Mexico? Or pretty much anywhere in Central and South America? These countries have negligible numbers of Muslims. There have been multiple Islamic terrorist attacks in Tanzania (which borders Zambia) and Kenya, both of which have significant Muslim minorities. Not to mention the frequent attacks by Boko Haram et al in Nigeria and the perp…
I'm not saying militant Islamism doesn't exist, but rather that the attacks have several underlying motivations, and that radicalization is more likely when there is a preexisting conflict.
Even the threats and attacks against cartoonists, as mentioned by another commenter, go beyond the simplistic "kill all infidels just because they exist".
Re: A Back Door to Encryption Won't Stop Terrorists
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you convince someone to refuse to be terrorized though? If I know someone who feels genuine fear when they hear about these sorts of attacks, what do I say to them? "You're an idiot", "here is some math", and "you're giving them power over you" are not effective approaches. How do I convince someone they should try to not feel fear if they strongly believe their fear is valid and that attempts to invalidate th…
What about people who think it's simply unjust when innocent people are killed in the name of some religious/political end? E.g. I know that there is almost no chance that I'll be the victim of gang violence. But that doesn't mean I have to just accept the existence of gang violence in my community.
> What about people who think it's simply unjust when innocent people are killed in the name of some religious/political end?
I don't think that you'll find many exceptions to that.
> E.g. I know that there is almost no chance that I'll be the victim of gang violence. But that doesn't mean I have to just accept the existence of gang violence in my community.
So, as a member of that community you then have the option to go out and do something about it. You can also move out, you can pay someone else to do something about it (which you already do through your taxes, hopefully they do enough). You can also keep your eyes open if you see anything suspicious and report it. You can rally support for better pay for the police so the chances of corrupt police interacting with gangs goes down.
And finally, it may actually mean that yes, you will have to accept the existence of gang violence in your community if that community is incapable of changing from within.
Gang violence takes a while to establish itself, and it - even with the best of the best working to get rid of it - can't be gotten rid overnight. Problems of this kind usually take roughly as long to fix as it takes to solve them.
Re: A Back Door to Encryption Won't Stop Terrorists
#217The IRA were known to recruit top stem students from universities in Ireland during their campaign to make bombs. Surely an entity as large and as well financed and ISIS would have little trouble finding bright young engineers & technologists sympathetic to their cause to simply build their own encrypted services? And then so much for the spooks 'backdoors'
Having traffic encrypted with illegal algorithms pass through the Internet would make you a target.
"illegal algorithms"
Wow, how do you define that? So, start banning math now?
Re: A Back Door to Encryption Won't Stop Terrorists
#218I think the entire discussion misses the even more important point - terrorists won't care whether encryption is backdoored or not. It's a good OPSEC to assume all communication is being listened to anyway, and to rely on steganography and disappearing in the noise. Bad guys will simply use the same backdoored crypto everyone else will be using, communicating in the same way they do today, because using the unbroken…
"rely on steganography and disappearing in the noise."
They already do that[0].
0. http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/steganography-how-al...
Re: A Back Door to Encryption Won't Stop Terrorists
#219I think the entire discussion misses the even more important point - terrorists won't care whether encryption is backdoored or not. It's a good OPSEC to assume all communication is being listened to anyway, and to rely on steganography and disappearing in the noise. Bad guys will simply use the same backdoored crypto everyone else will be using, communicating in the same way they do today, because using the unbroken…
"rely on steganography and disappearing in the noise." They already do that[0]. 0. http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/steganography-how-al...
Yes. My point is, they'll keep doing that, so backdooring encryption doesn't really help in any way.
Re: A Back Door to Encryption Won't Stop Terrorists
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
They found one of the terrorists phones dumped in a garbage can outside the theatre they attacked, and got the address of their hideout from the messages, so used just regular police work. All these guys were already on watch lists for fighting in Syria and returning just nobody seems to ever watch the watch list.
If that phone was properly secured then those messages wouldn't have been accessible.
That's roughly equivalent to 'if those documents had not been properly shred that data would not have been available'.
Each and every operation of this magnitude leaves a trail. The party perpetrating it will try what they can to erase that trail but that will always be an imperfect process.
Maybe next time the phone will be secured, they will scrub themselves of parking tickets, they will burn up their escape vehicle after a few minutes ride and so on. All the media has succeeded in doing is educate the terrorists about how to be more successful in evading capture and possibly being more successful in carrying out the attack in the first place.