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Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

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Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#351

Post by ShorsHammer »

vizzah wrote: post #320
jhh wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still remember how one German Islamist terror group just used their web-email provider's draft feature. They never 'sent' anything. There are often quite simple ways to circumvent this kind of thing.

Good, but your e-mail provider can still see it. And be forced to eavesdropping. Back in '90s I used a nym e-mail to receive e-mails anonymously and with no traces. In a few words - e-mails are encrypted with your PGP key and posted to Usenet groups, where you scan all messages and extract only those signed&encrypted with your key. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudonymous_remailer Yep, there are 1000 and 1 method o…

Protonmail has(claims) client-side encryption.

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#352

Post by arctangent »

blobs wrote: post #332
GordonS wrote: post #220

The idea that moves like this will "keep us safe" is utterly preposterous; there are a multitude of other ways in which terrorists (or the boogeyman de jour ) could communicate - are the UK and US governments going to insist on backdooring IRC, Slack and face-to-face conversations? Are they going to outlaw encryption libraries? I truely fear for the future that western governments, in particular the 5 eyes members, a…

The keeping safe argument from government is indeed preposterous. As if that was their mission to keep us safe. Why are they allowing our nature to be destroyed in favor of money/economy? This years heatwaves killed many thousands of people in Europe only, some estimates are in the tens of thousands. This is real deaths in 1 year, not because of terrorist attacks, no fucking backdoor will stop this. And what are they…

Cold weather causes more deaths than warm weather.

See for example: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/nov/30/excess-winte...

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#353

Post by louwrentius »

In The Netherlands a government VPN solution was left unpatched for many month, exposing critical infrastructure to any third-party hacking nation state.

I'm not a right-wing anti-government nutcase. I do believe that the government will not be able to keep such a back door secure.

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#354

Post by dodobirdlord »

Cpoll wrote: post #313
kick wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not personally have downmod capabilities, but I don't think it is necessarily too broad: If you interpret it as "People shouldn't read this", it seems reasonable.

I think equating "I disagree" with "people shouldn't read this" is problematic for a forum that wants to encourage discourse.

HN doesn't want to encourage discourse, it wants to encourage worthwhile discourse, and the distinction is significant. Consider "people shouldn't read this" as short for "Having made the mistake of wasting my time reading this, I will flag it to help others to not make the same mistake."

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#355

Post by rurban »

move-on-by wrote: post #138
rurban wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal was never safe: https://web.archive.org/web/20180914145702/https://sanderven... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12880520 The safe variant LibreSignal was killed by Signal. https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/wiki/What-to-do-a...

This comment is absurd. Your linked article even says: > To be clear: the reason for this is not security. To the best of my knowledge, the Signal protocol is cryptographically sound, and your communications should still be secure. The reason has much more to do with the way the project is run, the focus and certain dependencies of the official (Android) Signal app, as well as the future of the Internet, and what fut…

We are not talking about the protocol and simple one to one chats, we are talking about the app. They are several major weaknesses in Signal which have nothing to do with the protocol.

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#356

Post by fsloth »

fsloth wrote: post #176
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #164

I am weirdly.. giddy about this development. The more goverments try so hard to publicly force companies to, effectively, mandate backdoors, the more public will be aware of it. Added benefit is that FB will lose some market share. The sucky part is.. my mom loves Whatsapp. She was able to use it wo any issues. There are few alternatives that she was able to use so easily. All that said, I wonder. What is the breakin…

Unless your mom is planning to involve herself in illegal activities I don't see a problem. Most electronic communication channels are compromised anyway. If you don't want eavesdroppers, don't use electronics.

To the several downvoters: My point was not that it's okay to have surveillance.

My point was that there is no uncompromised electronical communications platform. If you wish to communicate using anything having room for a man in the middle attack, it is very hard to proof that the medium is NOT compromised by a nation state or another third party.

You can communicate fairly securely without the messaging being intercepted by black hat non-nationstate third parties. I don't think anyone can guarantee security against nation states.

So if you want to communicate, you either communicate, or you don't, but requiring a 100% tamperproof platform is really hard.

For example, Echelon system probably had/has intercept capability for all phone traffic in europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

These systems were in place in 1960:s. AFter that modern telecoms substrate was developed in close collaboration with nation state defence parties. As a non-expert, there is no reason to think any platform is secure from nation state eavesdropping.

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#357

Post by ur-whale »

BubRoss wrote: post #337
GordonS wrote: post #220

The idea that moves like this will "keep us safe" is utterly preposterous; there are a multitude of other ways in which terrorists (or the boogeyman de jour ) could communicate - are the UK and US governments going to insist on backdooring IRC, Slack and face-to-face conversations? Are they going to outlaw encryption libraries? I truely fear for the future that western governments, in particular the 5 eyes members, a…

Outlawing AES will be difficult since it is embedded into P CPUs.

That's assuming AES is safe.

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#358

Post by vbezhenar »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #278

A backdoor that will be exploited by criminal third-parties. Even if you (against all sense and reason) trust the US and UK governments, this is a move that will expose your data to criminals.

Not necessarily. Simplest implementation is to use government public key to encrypt session key and include that encrypted session key into a message. You can implement it with open source code, yet only government who possesses corresponding private key can decrypt the message.

I think that it'll be secure enough. If private company can keep their CA key in secret, government can do that too. Hardware Security Module stored in defended military place and guarded by soldiers, available for use only by authenticating of the few key politiancs.

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#359

Post by ur-whale »

Simon_says wrote: post #240
GordonS wrote: post #220

The idea that moves like this will "keep us safe" is utterly preposterous; there are a multitude of other ways in which terrorists (or the boogeyman de jour ) could communicate - are the UK and US governments going to insist on backdooring IRC, Slack and face-to-face conversations? Are they going to outlaw encryption libraries? I truely fear for the future that western governments, in particular the 5 eyes members, a…

> Are they going to outlaw encryption libraries? Yes. Absolutely. That's the only logical endgame.

Related to that, Bernstein vs. USG is a nice story.

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#360

Post by justforyou »

molmalo wrote: post #308
andrewflnr wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming the people making these rules actually understand encryption, which is doubtful at best.

In many cases, (In my country for sure, and I bet this is common elsewhere) members of the legislative branch are approached by people from the intelligence community, who hand them the drafts for stuff they 'need'. And you can bet those people do understand encryption.

They might understand encryprion, but that does not mean they are trustworthy nor truthful...
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