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UK Home Secretary says encryption on messaging services is unacceptable

reuters.com

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Re: UK Home Secretary says encryption on messaging services is unacceptable

#251

Post by nicky0 »

danmaz74 wrote: post #174
NetStrikeForce wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UK's best shot at surviving Brexit is become stronger on value added industries. They have a very good head start over any other EU country in IT and in some research areas. Amber Rudd seems hell bent on destroying their only chance.

Being ahead of all other EU countries in some field can be something significant while they're inside the EU, in those cases when an investment or purchase needs to be made inside the EU for any reason. But when they're out, what difference does that make?

It's not like relations with other European countries will immediately cease on leaving the EU.

Re: UK Home Secretary says encryption on messaging services is unacceptable

#252

Post by Silhouette »

bartread wrote: post #202

We're a very long way from being a totalitarian state and likely to remain so for quite some time but, make no mistake, this is the thin end of a very long and ultimately very fat wedge. It therefore behooves us well to hold the government to account when they try to get us to swallow more of that wedge. Sure, encryption helps terrorists as well as ordinary citizens but it's my belief that freedom and privacy are mor…

We're a very long way from being a totalitarian state and likely to remain so for quite some time

The scary thing is that the difference between the UK and the kind of place we might describe using words like "totalitarian state" is now more about how our laws are used in practice than what the laws actually say. The government and its agents already have very broad powers, our courts have already taken surprisingly illiberal positions when some of those powers have been challenged, and we lack the constitutional checks and balances often found elsewhere, more so if the government uses Brexit as a mechanism to remove those deriving from Europe without replacing them. We're basically just trusting that the government and its agents will be decent people and use the powers they have responsibly at this point, but as we've seen with the likes of Trump, that's a dangerous strategy when you don't know who the government will be in the future.

Re: UK Home Secretary says encryption on messaging services is unacceptable

#253

Post by ouid »

bartread wrote: post #202

We're a very long way from being a totalitarian state and likely to remain so for quite some time but, make no mistake, this is the thin end of a very long and ultimately very fat wedge. It therefore behooves us well to hold the government to account when they try to get us to swallow more of that wedge. Sure, encryption helps terrorists as well as ordinary citizens but it's my belief that freedom and privacy are mor…

It doesn't seem very thin from here. Encrypted messaging is a mathematical fact that your government is attempting to deny.

If I need a communication to be secret, I will encrypt it, and I don't need special software.

Re: UK Home Secretary says encryption on messaging services is unacceptable

#254

Post by jabl »

cm2187 wrote: post #96
ktta wrote: post #21

Hmm, this definitely brings up an interesting discussion I don't think HN has had before, especially something in a similar vein since Apple+San Bernardino fiasco. Obviously privacy is something that HN holds very close to its heart. But I'm interested in what do people here have to say about the privacy features are used by terrible people to do terrible things. And I want to share something that I think is one of t…

Terrorism, and crime in general is a nuisance that we have to live with. You can have a society with no crime. All you need is a super repressive totalitarian state, total transparency with citizens reporting on each others, state surveillance everywhere. It will work. But first I don't want to live in such a state. And second these totalitarian states slide invariably toward corruption and state crimes. So we have t…

> ... plane crashes ...

One difference is that airlines advertise in mass media, terrorist organizations don't.

Re: UK Home Secretary says encryption on messaging services is unacceptable

#255

Post by dTal »

blfr wrote: post #34
orian wrote: post #7

How do they want to prevent someone from creating his own end-to-end encryption app? It may use other protocols to encode content (images, tweets, fb posts etc.). For me it seems to be more in a direction of so called "Big Brother" than real counter-terrorism.

How do they want to prevent someone from creating his own end-to-end encryption app? That's not an issue. Writing solid encryption software is very difficult on its own. You will hear "do not roll your own crypto" all the time from security experts. We don't live in a James Bond universe and it's beyond the reach of terrorist organisations.

You vastly overestimate the difficulty. The reason we're commonly told not to roll our own crypto is because it's easy, and also easy to get wrong and possibly catastrophic if you do. But many perfectly serviceable algorithms are simple and public knowledge. Arguably a scenario where everyone's using their own crypto and half of it's broken is still better than everyone using the "industry standard, pre-backdoored for your convenience" version.

Of course it's utterly trivial to make a one-time-pad cryptosystem, and more practical in 2017 than ever. So what if the keylength must match the message length, my phone has a 32gb uSD. That's a lot of text messages.

Re: UK Home Secretary says encryption on messaging services is unacceptable

#256

Post by noja »

JCDenton2052 wrote: post #158
prodmerc wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They all are intent on crippling any chance the UK has at becoming stronger in high tech industries. I'm so sick of getting "this is an adult resource and you can't view it" anytime I search for information about a drug (pharmaceutical, not just "weed LSD and lols"). Great fucking way to encourage your future chemists. Maybe ban keywords like JavaScript, PHP and SQL while at it, them's the powerful drugs maaan.

One word, my friend: VPN.

To circumvent bad policy like encryption... Use encryption?

Re: UK Home Secretary says encryption on messaging services is unacceptable

#257

Post by peterwwillis »

orian wrote: post #7

How do they want to prevent someone from creating his own end-to-end encryption app? It may use other protocols to encode content (images, tweets, fb posts etc.). For me it seems to be more in a direction of so called "Big Brother" than real counter-terrorism.

They wouldn't prevent you from making encryption apps. It would be about regulation. You can regulate kinds of encryption (the strength of the algorithms/keyspace etc), and you can regulate who can use it (licensed copies only, or specific businesses only, or types of businesses, non-messaging platforms only, etc).

Then there's how you use it. They could mandate all of X businesses could only use encryption that could be inspected by the state, so either weak encryption, or PKI where you send the government your site's private key or use the state's CA or something. They can also mandate backdoors in encryption used in certain ways. And they can mandate that weak encryption be used outside their country's borders.

All of these are real parts of US laws on cryptography from WWII to 2000 to prevent "export" of "strong encryption", because of course evildoers around the world might make use of these "munitions". US law still regulates how we can use or distribute cryptography around the world. It is illegal in the US to release open source crypto on the internet without notifying the Bureau of Industry and Security. And 41 other countries (including the UK) have similar laws.

The one thing the US has going for it is the 1st Amendment, which makes it illegal for the US to prevent its citizens from making or using crypto within the US.

Re: UK Home Secretary says encryption on messaging services is unacceptable

#258

Post by stagbeetle »

DanBC wrote: post #197
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True but at the moment we have a particularly poor record of helping people with mental illness. This guy didn't slip through the cracks, he was totally ignored along with many others who are struggling.

There's absolutely no evidence he had mental illness, and you do harm to people with mental illness when you incorrectly link violent behaviour to mental illness. More important is his time in prison - where most UK terrorists were radicalised - and if you were saying that UK prisons don't rehabilitate I'd agree.

Is brutal violence against others not associated with mental disturbation?

Re: UK Home Secretary says encryption on messaging services is unacceptable

#259

Post by mseebach »

bartread wrote: post #202

We're a very long way from being a totalitarian state and likely to remain so for quite some time but, make no mistake, this is the thin end of a very long and ultimately very fat wedge. It therefore behooves us well to hold the government to account when they try to get us to swallow more of that wedge. Sure, encryption helps terrorists as well as ordinary citizens but it's my belief that freedom and privacy are mor…

I'm not sure that's even true. This seems more like a clipper chip moment, and more than being the beginning of a slippery slope, it made the government a laughing stock and probably sped up the pivot to encryption.

This too will fail spectacularly.

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