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Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

act.eff.org

251–260 of 361 posts

Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see heavy security with zero recourse by anyone to break it and anonymity is the top single problem with the Internet, not the lack of it. We should all have to log on with our identification through a blanket "know your customer" law like they do to combat money laundering in banks, and our country of origin at least should be displayed. Other than that... You want encryption? Fine, but if your id links you to 4ch…

I respectfully disagree with most of this. The last part was a bit all over the place though, not sure where exactly you were going. Others who know history much better than me are far better equipped to debate against your position. If you really want a challenge, I would invite you to reply to the top comment in this thread by Jon_Lowtek to help open a discussion on the deeper merits of your position. For me person…

I'm saying that the big giant corporations and the giant governments we used to fight against died or became completely ineffective to do their jobs and the only thing that happened was giant corporations took their place that are far more unethical than what they replaced... Funded and led by the same people who were once the underdogs!

I am aware of history as much to know that the Internet was designed by a bunch of people who talked on Ham radio and wanted a secure place to sell drugs to each other without being caught by the fuzz. They hated Ma' Bell. That's why it's designed the way it is. Then later it became the RIAA and the rest. I know all of that and if anything that's hardened my position on this, not decreased it. We don't live in the 1960s or the 1990s anymore, and what's worse is everything the people said during that time about how society would be if we went "full retard' into "fight the man" hipsterism and the subsequent deregulation of everything actually happened. Nobody laughs at Al Gore or Tipper these days, or Lars Ulrich for that matter.

Do you like musicians making a penny on a song leaving no room for art just lowest common denominator crap, the rise of the marxist/fascist camps that are hurling what was once a promising country that was getting over it's growing pains straight into 1920s/30s Germany at lighting speed, the totally unfiltered and unmoderated filth that is 4chan, etc? Or do you just ignore it because "some day blah blah blah dictator might take control" yet we are the closest we have ever been to a dictatorship because of faceless social manipulation technique where we have no clue who or where anyone we talk to is, whether they're paid, etc?

Not everyone is an engineer out looking for how things work. It's the same error the founding fathers made with the enlightenment thinking everyone is going to become smarter if you just opened everything up. It's complete baloney, people will just use the power vacuum to seize it for themselves because they make the most noise. Nobody cared about Aaron Swartz except the hacker community. Snowden sold out to the Russians from the beginning. And you're sitting there still in the year 2000 when all this stuff was new and the only ones who spoke were nerds and we all agreed on basically everything.

The point is that everything that this theory set out to solve, became worse. More nationalistic, more poor musicians with even bigger giant platforms controlling their art, more corrupt, more propagandized, etc. Not less. Everyone knows it. The other point is that instead of tearing stuff down and engaging in subversive activities for the same ends, maybe it's time to focus on making the systems you have better. Not turn it into some weird mix of The Matrix, Philip K. Dick, and William Gibson. They're just as bad of an instruction manual as 1984 was to be honest.

Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

#252
post #241

Unpopular view, but unrecoverable encryption deployed at web scale is a cancer on society. While unrecoverable encryption provides additional privacy to law abiding citizens, it normalizes low level criminal activity at scale. There has to be a better trade-off here that minimizes the risks of 3rd party access, and gives law enforcement and the intelligence agencies the tools they need to do the best possible job. If…

Would a bill really eliminate the concept altogether? It might make their business more expensive in certain parts but there are multi-billion dollar criminal empires that invest in things like their own submarine tech. Do you think e2e encryption isn't something they'd develop in-house & resell to each other? At best it might help catch some street level crime but any serious organized crime (which arguably is a big…

>criminal empires

True, you can’t stop math but you can try to police it. You can regulate consumer access. Doing so means one less “gone dark” area, which makes LE job easier.

>security exploits

To your point about low level criminals: Now that the cat is out of the bag, yes, surveillance worked way better when people didn’t know about it. Yes, more sophisticated criminals will try to employ their own encryption. If I were in LE or the IC, I’d still rather not deal with the oceans of data produced by essentially unbreakable encryption via big tech.

Will address point about uncapped value to an encryption exploit below.

>Snowden-style leak

Yes, which is why it is imperative to continually improve and audit such systems, including maybe removing such single points of failure as you noted, both from an insider threat perspective as well as from exploit discovery processes.

It would be helpful to consider how to build recoverable encryption in a way that minimizes the risks of the existence of the exceptional access mechanism, from all angles: technical, social, etc

Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

#253
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you're being facetious. We don't "have to first lose", its just the very likely outcome is that we will lose. That's not to say its not worth trying but that we should assume failure, otherwise you end up like the UK's Brexit negotiators who were "all-in" on the "oh they'll buckle as the time runs out" strategy and have no plan if that doesn't pan out beyond "so what now?". The basic strategy right now seems to run o…

I’m saying framing the climate crisis as “lost” is a bad way to gain support for positive change.

Well sure, its not the best marketing campaign but I'm not marketing for them so its fine as an opinion, isn't it?

Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

#254

Back in late medieval europa most postal services had a back room, called cabinet noir where letters where carefully opened, read and resealed to check them for signs of treason against the crown or cross. These were often abused for what we today would call economic espionage. For these reasons many rich people employed private couriers who traveled to their business partners in person to hand over messages. Those w…

To paraphrase someone I know, "once they run out of criminals, they'll just start catching people they don't like".

Once they have this ability, it will be much harder to make them give it up.

Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

#255

Back in late medieval europa most postal services had a back room, called cabinet noir where letters where carefully opened, read and resealed to check them for signs of treason against the crown or cross. These were often abused for what we today would call economic espionage. For these reasons many rich people employed private couriers who traveled to their business partners in person to hand over messages. Those w…

Someone’s been reading their Neal Stephenson.. :))

Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

#257

Things the EARN-IT bill (reminder: supposedly designed to protect children) doesn't do: - Increase funding for child protective services & foster care services - Increase funding for parents (EBT, social work, etc) - Increase funding for schools (comprehensive sex ed, etc) Because our priority is kids! Honestly! Seriously I mean it!

"Protect the kids" has been a meme for some time now. It's a dead horse being beaten in the afterlife. Surprisingly, it still works.

Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

#259

I have been wondering if there is a way to satisfy law enforcement without breaking encryption or adding backdoors. An idea: what if platforms allowed law enforcement (with a warrant) to conduct rainbow table attacks against encrypted content of a specific user? In other words, what if platforms allowed law enforcement to determine whether a specific known object (e.g. a known photo or video) was sent / stored by a u…

There is no situation in which the spread of "content" should be a crime. Any encryption that allows LE to track content is broken.

Good points.

Remembering back to the PRISM disclosures, metadata alone is enough to build a surveillance apparatus. So I guess even without decryption of all objects, confirmation of the existence of known objects could still be enough to conduct mass surveillance or enable other kinds of abuse.

Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

#260
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m saying framing the climate crisis as “lost” is a bad way to gain support for positive change.

Well sure, its not the best marketing campaign but I'm not marketing for them so its fine as an opinion, isn't it?

EFF is doing something. Countless organizations are working on climate change in meaningful ways. Spouting hopeless negativity about their efforts isn't interesting or helpful. In fact I think it is harmful because it perpetuates toxic hopelessness and discourages people from taking action.

You're entitled to your opinion and you have a right to express yourself but you don't have an obligation. Please consider the effect your words can have.

If you have constructive criticism please share it.

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