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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

#311

Post by rijncur »

Silhouette wrote: post #261
rijncur wrote: post #232

It is the duty of the Home Secretary (and the UK's various nosey institutions - e.g. intelligence agencies, police, etc) to continuously badger us for this information - unfortunately, it's pretty much part of the job description. It is our duty, as the public, to continuously say "no". Disregarding any negative consequences, their motivations are pretty transparent - there's little doubt that being able to read ever…

is the duty of the Home Secretary (and the UK's various nosey institutions - e.g. intelligence agencies, police, etc) to continuously badger us for this information - unfortunately, it's pretty much part of the job description. On the contrary. The Home Secretary is literally the holder of the ministerial authority that is required for police and security services to use a lot of the powers they have, and is supposed…

Perhaps I phrased it poorly - what I meant was that one can view the Home Secretary's requests for less privacy as a fact of life (just as death and taxes), and could consider refusing these requests as part of civic duty. You're correct, the HS usually turns somewhat authoritarian (regardless of whether it is their job to or not) - it is simply the public's duty to resist.

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

#312

Post by humanrebar »

emmab wrote: post #271
alistproducer2 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point, some politician is going to have to man up and speak the truth. The public will have to either accept that the government can try and protect it from low probability events by invading every aspect of our lives or people will have to accept the idea that there is a sub 1% chance of being killed by a crazy person.

> 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.

There's also a grey area where someone does something horrible and clearly politically motivated (shooting Reagan or Senator Giffords, shooting at Ft. Hood) and that person has mental health issues.

There's a semantic discussion about whether "lone gunmen" type attacks count as "terrorism", but categorizing motivations in real life as politics or insanity isn't so simple.

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

#313

Post by humanrebar »

makecheck wrote: post #211

We hear most terrorists ate with forks so all forks are now banned. Also, we were shocked to discover that virtually ALL criminals rely on something called Oxygen to perform their work so this is now a controlled substance that will be heavily regulated. We were then terrified to learn that after banning forks, terrorists were able to successfully eat with spoons or even their hands. /s Seriously, you cannot ban tool…

More to the point, terrorists lock their doors! We need to ban deadbolts!

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

#314

Post by timthorn »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #213
timthorn wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can find MVNOs without filtering, such as Andrews & Arnold

Andrews & Arnold is unfortunately many times more expensive than the more "mainstream" ISPs. Much cheaper to get a Sky/Virgin connection, and then route all your traffic off their networks over a VPN to a cheap couple of quid VPS per month.

My point was more about them offering a mobile service - many here know of them as a good ISP, but it is less well known that they offer the same quality of Internet access via mobile.

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

#315

Post by tormeh »

goodplay wrote: post #269
tormeh wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, ISPs could implement a whitelist of communication methods. Maybe all content would have to be signed by a whitelist of apps before it's allowed through the network. Images would have to be signed by the camera app, so no steganography would be possible. From a business perspective it would be like going back to before the internet, but many of the services we associate with the internet like Facebook, Netflix e…

What about using latency or throughput as a signal? What about tunneling data over seemingly normal pictures taken by said camera app? What about switching the "User Available online" indicators at a seemingly natural rate? What about all three at the same time? I assure you, steganography will always be possible. The only think a ban on encryption would do is hurt (badly) society, personal privacy, and those who wan…

Sure, it would be a bit of a whack-a-mole, but in the end sending concealed messages would become extremely difficult.

It's technically impossible to do perfectly, but as we all know, perfect is the enemy of good enough ;)

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

#316

Post by mderazon »

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.

If you ban encryption and monitor all traffic in the world then you can easily flag messages you can't read as suspicious. You can then hunt down people using the encryption.

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

#318

Post by toyg »

nthcolumn wrote: post #266
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…

A long way? Real democracies do not spy on their people because it isn't a democracy anymore when you do. Whether that was always just a... well it is another matter. Business had a reasonable expectation of safe-passage. Who will want their traffic coming through the UK now? What multi-national/trans-national wants all their IP belong to the UK government? They will just go elsewhere. It's the economy stupid. Rudd i…

On the other hand: China.

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

#319

Post by megous »

humanrebar wrote: post #308
seanhandley wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry, many soldiers are murderers. There's clear intention to kill. And justification does not happen simply because some idiot in power tells someone to go kill other people for political reasons.

And coalition is also killing civilians for political reasons, more than thousand of them a month ATM. It is obviously calculated. It's just that someone determined murdering perhaps 5-10 thousands civilians is a OK to give power over Mosul back to Iraqi government, and gave it a go.

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

#320

Post by ktta »

natch wrote: post #283
ktta wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually didn't suggest a complete solution. You seem to judge the proposition without any further questions. I said the monitoring software having access to the data was a solution. But you're probably thinking of a case where there is a master encryption key which we just hand to the government. But have you thought of a solution where we can be sure of the access that the software will have? Something like a inf…

>I actually didn't suggest a complete solution. Nobody is saying you did. You yourself said "that is a perfect solution actually" in response to vinceyuan, who had a one-liner comment about "the source code of the monitoring software must be reviewed by independent and trusted software engineers/experts." Maybe we are interpreting this in different ways. How do you envision this "solution" working? It is a bit vaguel…

> That means there are still problems for you and me to solve.

This was my last sentence. With which I tried to say that we have to still solve the problem and come up with the solution. My comment "that's a perfect solution" was about the answer "software that can effectively monitor communications with proper privacy" to the question about properly reconciling privacy and security, in a situation where the people are okay with their communications being monitored.

But are you are expecting a answer to the question, "How will the software work?" from me.

I have no clue as so how it'll exactly work. But since you're so interested, I'll take a stab:

> Who is doing the monitoring?

The software. No humans will ever see the raw communications which haven't been flagged. Now this is obviously the tricky part. This is not a backdoored system with a magic decryption key. What I had in mind was a software possibly in-built with the communications protocol, which will, with near perfect accuracy flag suspicious communications. This is will need a leap of tech in Machine learning with NLP.

> What or who is being monitored?

All the communications (through the node) are being monitored.

> For example are we talking about monitoring the authorities to see if their access is done properly?

'They' have no access. Only the software does. How that is done is up to the "engineers/experts" to figure out. This will obviously need a change in communications architecture. When it comes to properly securing the physical part (the servers), I'm sure something can be figured out there.

> As long as you're being super vague, you don't have a solution at all.

See my first line in this comment. I don't have a solution, but I do believe that a solution exists to a problem. They're very different things.

As an analogy, in mathematics, that's similar to me saying the problem is solvable, but you're talking about the actual solution.

And sure, this is a 'perfect' solution where monitoring communications is even a possibility. I don't even support that possibility. The first comment I replied to does, which said:

"If I have to choose one from end-to-end encryption and security, I will choose security. I don't mind my WhatsApp chats are scanned by police's software, if it can reduce terrorism. Of course, we need to make sure it is used for anti-terrorism only."

So in the first place, monitoring is something that will be done. Now in that scenario, there's a solution (In retrospect, I don't think I should've said perfect).

I don't think you are going to be happy with this solution. I don't expect everyone to be. I probably will be, because while I want privacy, I'm amenable to a solution I can trust in a situation where there has to be some kind of monitoring.

Since we live in a democracy (I hope you don't live in an oppressive monarchy), it can happen when the majority of the people (senators, actually, because it is a Republic) agree with a situation when monitoring is okay.

Your opinion or my opinion is not enough to change everyone else's opinions. So we might have to learn to live with it.

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