291–299 of 299 posts
The assumption is to let law enforcement do their job with safeguards in place to prevent overreach. The tech community are in a good position to monitor overreach and provide transparency, right?
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> A child being abused 1000 times is obviously awful but its not as bad as 1000 being abused once. Obvious to you. The problem with this sort of reasoning is that children are not mathematical objects. It is also the sort of reasoning that ultimately leads to the rest of society deciding that us tech people are incapable of setting things up in such a way that abuse potential is minimized. Then you get reactive stuff…
Thanks for your continued replies and balanced counterpoints to various statements (including my own). Maybe I've gone the wrong direction, but I'm almost convinced now that it may actually be worse to make public statements linking encryption to child abuse because it potentially paints backdoors as a solution in the minds of the non-technical folks, and potentially makes child abuse closer to appearing to be a "sol…
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I also this is a good time to remember that not every citizen has to have the same values on this. Some people might think the tradeoff in terms of freedoms vs security is worth it. It seems everyone is so eager to paint the other side as objectively wrong / motivated by bad intentions, when in reality I don't believe this is an objectively right answer. As a society we have to decide how much freedom and security we…
Also I think "Security" was the wrong term to use - maybe "Societal Order" is better? What I mean is if companies are required to build in law enforcement backdoors, we could see X benefit (ie some % reduction in certain types of crime) and Y damage (some reduction in technical security, some reduction in govt accountability, etc). Personally, I place a lot of value on the Y damage, so I don't think the tradeoff is w…
The problem isn't that it's algebraic though. There are no back doors, once governments have it then all your freedom to communicate against them is broken. I don't know why anyone would look at the likes of world leaders such as Xi, Putin, KJI and Trump and think this is a good idea in any way.
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I also this is a good time to remember that not every citizen has to have the same values on this. Some people might think the tradeoff in terms of freedoms vs security is worth it. It seems everyone is so eager to paint the other side as objectively wrong / motivated by bad intentions, when in reality I don't believe this is an objectively right answer. As a society we have to decide how much freedom and security we…
But those citizens need to restrict the freedom and security of others. In Europe we have many examples of human trafficking where officials had problems to investigate because of political reasons and other problems, mainly understaffed law enforcement. Every police force asks for more powers, every interior ministry wants more surveillance. Even with decryption tools, I don't see how traffickers would suddenly not…
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Privacy is a human right. Encryption backdoors for governments are human rights abuses. It has nothing to do with safety; it is not a debate about “how much safety do we purchase with reduced privacy”. It’s just as firearms rights have nothing to do with hunting, or a militia.
Human rights are man-made and arbitrary. They aren't some kind of holy text that must be protected at all costs. They must be bent and ignored if necessary. You can't just say "this is a human right" to shut down any discussion.
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"It is much easier for police in authoritarian countries to prevent crimes and find perpetrators." Is this actually true? This sounds like one of those bits of received wisdom (like the trains supposedly running on time under Mussolini) that turns out to be bogus. I'm not sure that the expansion of police powers under authoritarian regimes has anything to do with making them more efficient at preventing or solving cr…
Authoritarian states tend to be not as advanced technologically (one consequence of authoritarianism!), thus their police forces should be less efficient in general despite the increased powers. But controlling for other factors, why wouldn't enhanced surveillance help catch criminals? It's a pretty logical claim. Perhaps you should look for the evidence and bring back to us. For now, it is reasonable to accept the c…
The idea that police in an authoritarian state are just like police in a democracy only with more powers seems hopelessly naive. Everything about their structure and accountability is different, and it doesn't seem to follow from some "common sense argument" that you can just assume they are more efficient controlling for technology.
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Authoritarian states tend to be not as advanced technologically (one consequence of authoritarianism!), thus their police forces should be less efficient in general despite the increased powers. But controlling for other factors, why wouldn't enhanced surveillance help catch criminals? It's a pretty logical claim. Perhaps you should look for the evidence and bring back to us. For now, it is reasonable to accept the c…
Given the needle in a haystack effect? Common sense has proven itself wrong repeatedly It was "common sense" that merchants had to be frauds because the value of goods was universal and they had transport labor. Besides just because they can doesn't mean they will. Authoritarians are also infamous for both corruption and finding rooting out dissidents a higher priority than what most would call actual crime. All othe…
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It's easy. Someone uses encryption? Jail him regardless of the content. You can't hide the existence of the message.
> Someone uses encryption? Jail him regardless of the content. Right, so by using Hacker News you're falling afoul of your own rules. > You can't hide the existence of the message. You totally can: properly encrypted data is indistinguishable from random noise.
The random noise IS the point. you cannot hide its very existence, and a government agent might not want to believe you if you said that it's just random data.
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It's easy. Someone uses encryption? Jail him regardless of the content. You can't hide the existence of the message.
Of course you can hide the existence of the message. The art and science of doing so is called steganography. Some forms of steganography are intended to be completely undetectable, while others merely offer plausible deniability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
> Generally though, there are many techniques known to be able to hide messages in data using steganographic techniques. None are, by definition, obvious when users employ standard applications, but some can be detected by specialist tools. Others, however, are resistant to detection - or rather it is not possible to reliably distinguish data containing a hidden message from data containing just noise -
You cant hide the existence of the data. You can pretend that it's just random bits. But they are still here, and an opponent can see them.