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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

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose we came upon a time where some new technology had emerged allowing anyone with an average intelligence to be able to create a virulent bio weapon from materials so​ common and available that their restriction is impossible. In this world, we are almost surely doomed, but perhaps the only hope for survival on earth (ignore space diaspora for the moment) would be from instituting an all pervasive surveilance pr…

That's a happy Sunday afternoon thought, but we are not at that point yet. The point we are at is one in which corrupt governments seek to control us not for our own safety, but because they crave power and control.

I agree. However, I frequently see absolute declarations about how freedom should not be curtailed for security, and while I believe that is true today, I can envision a possible future where that is not possible without leading to near or complete extinction. Therefore I find it useful foil to shake up absolutisms.

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

#302
post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is brutal violence against others not associated with mental disturbation?

Violent people are violent. They may also have mental illness, but usually it's coincidental. In this specific case there's no suggestion he had mental illness, and it's ignorant to suggest he did.

Violent people aren't violent because they are violent. There is an underlying cause for someone to use force against another, especially when it is socially unacceptable.

Perhaps it doesn't fit under the "common" mental illnesses of depression, anxiety, etc. but it lines up well with thought disorders. A sane and well person would not jeopardize themselves, and their fellow species.

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

#303
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She's probably being led by the intelligence services on this, and of course they have ulterior motives, their ultimate project is to collect all signals, or as many as they can manage, which apps like whatsapp are thwarting at present. Why can't we collect all the signals all the time? This is incredibly dangerous for our society, no-one should have that much power. That power isn't about terrorism (or even very use…

An intelligence led response to terrorism is a result of learning from Northern Ireland. Internment caused harm; talking to the terrorists brought peace. Don't forget that while they were talking to the IRA politicians were saying in public "we don't talk to terrorists".

Ironically the early stages of such talks were held in a chip shop via a senior civil servant as a proxy, because it was vital to keep this "collusion" away from the awareness of security forces.

(There was a great documentary about this on TV, but I cannot remember the name of it)

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

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I beg to differ. My (and everyone's else) right to have a copy of tcpdump doesn't violate you right to privacy.

Sure, but how do you feel about a person's right over their personal information being systematically collected by their government, several large corporate entities, and a dozen or so international spy agencies? What about when this information is used to economically bind them into submission?

Ah, but that's about how the tools are used, not what they are and who has them.

I believe, any entity, from a mere individual to a government agency or multinational corporation should be free to possess any software tools they may desire. How they use those is another matter.

I do "spy" on my own traffic on my own network running on my own hardware on my own premises. I've had some audits for possible malware/spyware, did reverse engineering protocol analysis, etc - and believe everyone should be able to do that. I shouldn't be able to do this on someone's else traffic without their informed consent - nor technically, neither legally (I believe, both of those aspects are important).

As for your question - I don't like this, of course. Don't think there is anyone well-informed and in their sane mind who does.

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

#305
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on. If this was really ISIS, then we plainly have nothing to fear. My bet is that he's just a random crazy, but of course these days it suits the political narrative to brand such people 'terrorists' to stoke public fear

Stop tossing out mental health as a reason. There's nothing to say he had mental illness, and you cause harm to people with mental illness when you incorrectly link violence to mental illness.

I used the word 'crazy', rather than mentioning mental health issues. 'Crazy' does not just refer to people with mental health issues, if refers to irrational acts.

To expand on my point, some of these small-scale 'terrorist' attacks show very little evidence of being coherently planned, and it's difficult to believe that an organised terrorist group is behind them. It seems more likely that some of these acts were performed by people acting alone, or vulnerable people provoked to it - and yes, some of these people may well be mentally ill; that hardly means they cannot be capable of violence.

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

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all people who need it can write their own encryption.

You don't have to, because it is already written and fairly easy to use. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to encrypt a message using asymmetric cryptography, that will be difficult - if possible to break. People who will want to conceal contents of their messages could still send them encrypted via WhatsApp or other platform regardless if there is a backdoor or not. UK Home Secretary has just displayed unprece…

And you have just displayed a high level of social incompetence. How this will manifest in practice is not the UK government attempting to outlaw mathematics, but UK judges being instructed to accept the fact of encryption usage as circumstantial evidence of criminal liability in prosecutions. That is to say, if all your communications are encrypted, that can be treated as probable cause for arrest and detention, or could be enough to swing the decision in an otherwise undecidable court case.

Law is social code and it runs not on logic but on the belief of a sufficient majority of the public. If technological factors cannot be overcome, social ones can. You are very naive to think that a governmental entity has to care about logic with regard to individual humans, just as ants would be naive to think they could dissuade you from stepping on them when you walk through the garden. The fact that encryption is technically possible under almost any circumstances (even in prison you could conceivably exchange encrypted messages tapped out in morse code through the walls, say) doesn't matter because the calculus of criminal responsibility doesn't depend on some objective process int he way that an encryption algorithm does.

Nerds are very logical, but people in general are not, and appealing to their sense of logic or consistency is dangerous because you cannot rely on them to change their behavior or attitude for cognitive reasons. Organized religion epitomizes this; people may or may not believe in the actuality of an inaccessible personal divinity, but a) the social rewards for professing to do so may vastly outweigh other considerations, and b) the people who do believe will abandon logic before they'll abandon a belief structure that makes them feel good about themselves.

The UK Home Secretary isn't applying for a job in network security or at a tech company. She's telling people what sort of trouble they're going to be in if they insist on deploying or using strong encryption. And since she's in charge of the police, she is capable of making good on those claims. She is perfectly competent - not at the consistent management of information systems, but at wielding political power.

Your idea of winning an argument is a logical demonstration that would be accepted by your peers. A social entity's idea of winning the argument (by social entity I mean an organized collective intelligence, from a village to a superstate) is to simply remove you physically from the field of play. Societies are coordinated in the same manner as insect swarms or other eusocial structures; They are no less distinct for being distributed, and logical arguments have no meaning to them except insofar as they impact the swam's environment, which is not at all the same thing as the environment of the individual swarm members, even the most senior ones.

This is why a 'privacy first' app/platform/protocol will never succeed on those merits alone. The social body can always make arguments against privacy, for exactly the same reason that you don't care about the feelings of any cancerous or invasive cells that spring to life inside your physical body. What's needed are tools that are built to include privacy from the ground up, but whose use case is better speed and functionality, such that people cannot bear to go without the tools they confer an overwhelming economic advantage.

Thus, fax machines were more 'private' than telex machines insofar as fax transmissions were harder to decrypt, plus they could just be plugged into any telephone socket. But if that had been their only advantage they'd have been banned. the overwhelming benefit of a fax machine was that you could just feed a sheet of paper into it - almost any kind of paper - and send it to someone else by pushing a single button. This was a massive time-saver for business - much cheaper and simpler than installing a Telex system, much cheaper and faster than sending documents around by courier, and much more practical than relying on verbal agreements and notes from telephone conversations.

(I'd like to make it clear that fax machines were never designed or marketed to be secure comms channels, but as a purely practical matter they filled that function for many people, and people who still use faxes often do so because they feel somehow more 'secure' than email.)

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

#308
post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sub 1% chance of being killed by a crazy person. Please don't attribute homicidal political views to insanity. These people don't have schizophrenia, and people with schizophrenia aren't terrorists.

Terrorists are politically motivated murderers. So are soldiers in any army. The only difference is in who they answer to.

You just called a lot of really honorable people murderers.

Murder is unjust killing. Killing civilians to make a point or to cause chaos is, by definition, murder. Let's not equate that with all the legitimate things armed forces are for.

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

#309
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a crime as in "unlawful act punishable by a state or other authority". You are welcome to disagree, but I'd be interested in your definition of "crime" then.

My point is, there is nothing wrong with pushing a slot machine's buttons, even if it is done in a way that defeats the RNG. The difference between this and counting cards in a game of Black Jack is, the RNG can easily be fixed to prevent this. You provided it as an example of "organized crime", and doing so heavily suggests that it is wrong. We tend to conflate "wrong" and "unlawful", and for good reason: the law is…

My argument is that even small organized crime groups were capabale of sophisticated operations so it's absolutely not far-fetched to assume that they may be able to implement end-to-end encryption apps. Whether this "organized crime" is "wrong" does not make much difference. It might be even easier to find people to implement it as not many would have moral issues.

Speaking of moral issues, cheating on casino is pretty much off limits on my personal moral compass. That the attack was possible within the normal mode of operation does not make it less of a fraud. Imagine if the casino would reverse-engineer a slot machine and find a way to abuse it within the normal mode of operation, making odds (even more) in their favor. That would be fraud, plain and simple, and I don't see why a player should be held to a different standard.

You are absolutely right, not everything unlawful is wrong. But I fail to see which benefit we as a society would have by allowing exploitation of technical deficiencies in slot machines for profit. It is a crime and it is wrong in my book.

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

#310
There are a few reasons to laugh at her position.

* The UK government leads the "free world" in ignoring its own warrant process, and pursuing a "collect it all" strategy for commsec. UK citizens have no reason to trust that their government, given such access, would not abuse it. They've abused all their other access thus far.

* Privacy and Security help normal citizens and criminals alike. This is as true for a locked front door as it is for an encrypted message. We grant governments the ability to violate privacy under warrant - they may snoop, spy, enter our homes, and read our mail. We do not grant them the ability to violate security, however. They still have to pick the lock, steam the envelope, and crack the safe. These are important distinctions. We do not engineer a backdoor into all encrypted messages, for the same reason we don't mandate a government master key for all doors.

* The idea that you can legislate math out of existence is a joke.

There is one reason to cry at her position.

* They will eventually legislate this way anyway.

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